Three toads in a few hours — three of anything alive other than ticks and mosquitoes is good, but three fat toads makes me happy. It shows our yard is clean, insects plentiful, the blades on my mower set high enough. One lurched out of a pile of rocks dumped in the driveway, another from garden dirt I was moving, another from high grass I was poking through before mowing. I carried all of them to the big flower garden and set them loose.
I’m building another stone wall. I love doing this. If I had the stone and the land I would build them everywhere, in loops and arrowed lines, in spirals and triangles, and know that life will find its way to them — spiders and chipmunks and white footed mice and toads and snakes and silk cocoons and ants and long tailed weasels.
Anymore, with nature under assault, with the madness of killing and the destruction of children so common as to be accepted with a awful shrug, I long for more life, for more birds, for the renewed call of owls, foxes and raptors, for turkey vultures to show themselves in kettles over every woodlot and field.
Longing for more life — that’s what it comes down to. Not things: a new car, time in Fiji, to ride a camel, to meet anyone famous (who cares). Longing has changed since childhood and young manhood — I wanted to play ball better than I ever could — hit the open shot, hit the open man, hear the crowd go mad for me. Girls, of course (the inept always dream). Later, in my twenties, to live in NYC when it was still filled with the unexpected everywhere. Then, to be the best teacher possible. And always, as I’ve come to discover, to please my father without consciously seeking to please him.
Now, longing is simpler — to live whole and mobile and to be able to lift and walk and read, think, write. Once it was to jump and sweep the boards. Now it is to not be frail. Now it is a longing for anything good to survive the maniac and his Party. Now it is to hear and see birds. Now it is to hope that wolves will make it through. Now it is to care for my wife and dogs.
My Jewish friends sometimes say “Aus Hais”, More Life, when they warm to someone or as a goodbye, so Aus Hais to toads, more toads, more crows, more children rescued, more life for the good and the just, more life for me, and more life for you too, my friends, scattered everywhere now, stumbling forward as best we can, More Life, More Life!
