Half a century ago my mother and brother developed a fondness for those itty aquatic frogs one could buy in aquarium shops selling fresh water tropical fish and supplies. I thought they were cute. They didn't grow to more than an inch long.
No matter how the tank was lidded, those little buggers would get out of the tank clamber down off the table the tank was on and crawl off.
I once found one dead in the middle of the living room, a little smudge of soft gray clinging to a frond of cream carpet pile, his tiny forleg over one eye as if he were searching for a break on the horizon of a vast sea of wooly dry arctic. Another was found on the dial to the telephone in the back hall. He was on his back, draped over the hole to the number 8. One expired clinging to the outside of the toilet bowl in the bathroom off the back hall. Others escaped and were never found.
There had been both male and female frogs in the aquarium, so they didn't wander off because mates were unavailable. The aquarium was always clean. The frogs were well-fed. The habitat had dozens of inviting crannies to hide in, varied textured pebbles and plantings to climb over and through, neat gullies to explore, lots of hiding places under the water and fronds to peer through. They weren't too warm or too cold.
However, nearly all of those those frogs seemed to compelled to make break for the Great Beyond. Most of the time, they were caught and gently returned as they climbed over the lip of the tank or were slime-slithering down its glassy side. Everyone did a frog count and a recce every time they came into the den or even passed through it. Yet, escape they did. I always wondered what those little amphibian Vascos were searching for. Maybe they required a change of scenery. Maybe they were suicidal.
Of course their little corpses stank. It was never an overpowering reek. Their decay process didn't pervade the entire room they died in. Some got as far as the kitchen. Often the smell of death was so imperceptible, so transitory, that it went unnoticed or its source was never located. Frog-passage was no more than a secretive little whiff of something rotten somewhere, an invisible exclamation mark that would appeared under one's nose as one walked down a hall or past a closet door. One didn't really become aware of it until one had passed the point at which the whiffette had entered one's olfactories. Often backtracking failed to pick up a repeat of the exclamation.
After a few years my mother and brother got tired of finding corpses and schlepping to the Fish World to purchase spares. When the last one died in the habitat, possibly of loneliness or boredom, the tank was converted into a terrarium for my mother's never-ending campaign of orchids and rare or difficult to grow hairy plants with exotic colored leaves.
My mother passed away in February, 2007. The following September I went to Texas to pick through its remains, after other relatives had ransacked it. All the plants in the house were gone, except for a few dying condiment jars of ivy, which she was always rooting, though she'd run off everyone she could have given them to.
I was emptying the three closets in the den. At the very back of one, wedged between the round molding on the wooden floor and a junction in a corner, was a tiny mummified frog.
There was that leathery little frummie in the farthermost corner of its universe, a closet that hadn't been emptied out for 3 or 4 decades in the room in which the aquarium had been thousands of froggy life cycles before.
The purpose of that closet hadn't hadn't changed in 5 decades. I have changed in five decades. I left my habitat 15 years prior to that trip, only visiting 3 times in the interim.
I went from 59 years of age to 13, in a split second.
That entire week was a series of what could only be compared to acid flashbacks. Finding the frummie was a mild one.
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