Written by J. Mitchell Brown
Photography courtesy of Tamela Maxim

ack when I was little, I received a gift that to this day remains one of my favorite gifts. You’ll see how weird that sounds in just a bit. I can’t really remember when I got this gift – birthday, Christmas, summer scercy – but I remember my mom was the one who gave it to me.

It was fairly nondescript: Basically it was a coupon in an envelope. But the coupon held a lot of promise for a boy of eight or nine years.

All I had to do was fill this coupon out with some easy information – name, address, and when I’d be home to receive my package – then put it in an envelope that was already addressed to some foreign land called “Arkansas.” I didn’t even have to put a stamp on it! How much easier could this be?

I did as the instructions directed me, and made sure I concentrated on using my neatest handwriting lest some other imposter sharing my name get what was rightfully mine.

The weeks crawled by and from the time I sent my information to the time my package arrived was interminable. I waited every day for the postman. On the days he ran late, I became particularly agitated when he didn’t drive up in his little jeep at or before the exact minute I had calculated as the time that he delivered the mail everyday. I would have given him some benefit of the doubt had there been a tornado or Armageddon, but it was a wonderful summer sunny day. Didn’t he realize the importance of the parcel he carried in his mail bag?

Then I heard it: the familiar sound of gravel crunching underneath tires on the next street over. The acceleration and stopping of a vehicle pausing at every house was unmistakable. My ears perked up like a cat hearing a can opener. I couldn’t have been more alert if there was a fleet of ice cream trucks coming my way.

When he rounded the corner to my street I was fleet of foot. I don’t think I ever touched the ground between our back door and the mailbox. As the mailman slowed to a stop he leaned way over to the mail bins that sat in the seal where the driver normally should sit. (It was back in the day where the Post Office actually had right seat drive mail jeeps. What ever happened to those?) He flipped through some envelopes and catalogues and handed me a stack of each.

“There you go, buddy,” he said.

There you go? That’s all he had to say? There you go? What kind of poop was this?

Just when I was about to jump over the postman and start rummaging through his bags and bins, he said, “Oh, wait...here’s one more.” Never taking his eyes off me, he reached behind the seat next to him and brought out the biggest styrofoam cup I’d ever seen.

I dropped all of that other worthless junk like bills and Dad’s paycheck on the ground and reached for the cup as though I was handling a Faberge egg. I carefully studied the cup, which was easily five or six inches around. The walls of the cup were at least an inch thick and were made of some super-styrofoam. It looked and felt like a styrofoam cup, but you couldn’t dent it with your fingernail like a normal cup. The cup had a huge cork in the top which made it look like a cup of soup on steroids disguised as a bottle of wine.

On the side was a label that read “Mr. Mitch Brown.” Not only had my scercy arrived, but I was a “mister.” I was pretty sure I had reached the zenith of my life.

The return address verified that this, indeed, was the package I was looking for and that it had originated from the right place: The Grow-A-Frog Company.

I carefully opened the cup to reveal a sealed plastic bag full of water with my very first pet: a tadpole I named Charlie. At the bottom of the cup was a complete set of instructions on how to make sure that my new charge lived a happy and carefree life. I remember watching in amazement as I studied my tadpole for upwards of six hours a day and gradually realized he had grown some legs and lost his tail. Before I knew it, I had a regular bullfrog. I’d talk to him and he’d “knee-deep” right back at me. I’d find him culinary delights of crickets and moths to supplement that smelly flaky stuff the Grow-A-Frog people had sent along with him. He had his own aquarium and I was more diligent about keeping it clean than I ever was about keeping my own room clean; much to my mother’s chagrin.

I even took Charlie on vacation with me to Edisto one summer, but that proved to be his undoing. On the ride home, I gave Charlie a prime spot to ride in my dad’s old three-on-the-tree Ford pickup. I carefully set Charlie’s travel aquarium on the hump of the floorboard where the drive shaft was. As I rode home with my head in my Dad’s lap, and my feet hanging out the window (which Dad always said I was going to leave on some road sign in Round O if I wasn’t careful) I dreamed the dreams of kids on summer vacation. When we got home and were unpacking, I noticed that Charlie must’ve been having similar dreams...he was floating on his back with his legs straight out. When I tried to wake him up by poking him with my finger, I almost scalded myself in the hot water that filled his aquarium. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the hump on the floor of that old un-airconditioned truck might not have been the best place for a frog. I won’t even bother with the details of an eight year old boy losing his first pet frog. It’s not pretty.

But I grew up from that experience and ended up burying a total of three Charlie-the-frogs that I got from the Grow-A-Frog company. Each one is buried side by side underneath a little woodburned marker nailed to a pine tree in my mom’s back yard.

It occurred to me recently that with all the dry weather we’ve been having, that I hadn’t heard any frogs singing lately. And when you think about it, that’s really a deafening silence. Frogs in the lowcountry create a splendid background song that most of us never think about. Sort of like cicadas and seagulls and the din of traffic on 278.

With the recent and welcomed rain we’ve had around here lately, I’m proud to announce that the frogs have once again begun singing and have not decided to move to some wetter locale. My neighbor’s koi pond has also become a refuge for hydrophilic frogs, and their music in the morning and evening is a sweet sound to hear.

A few years back when we lived out in Pinckney Colony there were similarly dry conditions. We had not had rain for well over a month. The ground was parched, grass was brittle, and the heat was ridiculous. Then one day the sky darkened and the thunder rolled and the rain began to fall, first in droplets, then in sheets. For an hour it rained so hard that you thought surely you needed to inflate a rescue raft. Then just as quickly as it began, it faded out and stopped.

As the clouds rolled out towards the sea and the thunder rumbled in the distance, I grabbed my wife’s hand and we set out to walk around the woods to enjoy the refreshment of the summer rain. As we emerged from the woods on our side of Harrison Island to the road in front of our neighbor’s house, we heard something that to this day I have a difficult time describing. It was the sound of ten thousand, if not a hundred thousand, voices celebrating. We walked down our friend’s driveway and stopped on his marsh-surrounded causeway and laughed as we realized we had to raise our voices to be heard. We were surrounded by armies of unseen frogs, each croaking and chirping and burping with glee at the reprieve the rain provided from the dry summer heat. The thunder of these happy frog voices was palpable, energizing....deafening. I do not exaggerate when I say that I had to practically shout at my wife who was standing two feet from me in order to be heard. We stood with our feet in mudpuddles and laughed along with the frogs until it became too dark to see, happy for the change of pace from the relentless arid summer.

Charlie would have approved.