COMMUNITY

We had some peculiar neighbors in Iowa City, but most of our current neighbors have snouts, snoods, or scent sacs. And though the old Longfellow neighborhood had a wide variety of individuals, few of them grew hind legs and molted their tails.

We have some human neighbors out here, too, but the relationships are different. You might not see them for months, but they appear when you need them.

There’s cigar guy, for example. We nod when our trucks pass. He pulled me out of the ditch several times before I got the 4WD. He lives far away but has a barn and paddock over the hill. He leaves on the radio in the barn and plays quality music for his small herd of cows. They really are some happy looking girls. Never saw him without a stubby cigar in his teeth.

To the west we have the cowboys. They’re brothers who ride horses to tend their thousand acres and thousand head of cattle. They have the requisite bathtub grotto with the Virgin Mary in their yard not too far from some sort of restraining device for castrating bulls. We've heard some terrifying bovine Hail Marys float over the hills when the steering-committee goes to work.

Another neighbor has the most astounding gray afro you’ve ever laid eyes on. It’s massive. When he’s plowing next door, it looks like some big tough grandma on the tractor. He let us know how much he wanted to tear down our "$%^&*(*" Obama sign. 

When the biggest tree in the woods was blown over, it filled our front yard and smashed our fence. I figured we’d be dealing with that all summer, but Rod from down near Wellman showed up that very day. He and his chain saw got to work and before long, the tree was gone, there were logs piled neatly in the woods nearby, and our fence was rebuilt. All this in one day. When he was done and I got out my checkbook, he shook his head. “Nope. Good day to show my son how to be a good neighbor.” Take that, State Farm.

Anna Marie-at the end of our road-is a widow who plows, herds, harvests, drives a school bus, transports Miller’s Sweet Corn to market, and creates cherry pies the whole world yearns for. She is never without a smile and a wave. Even a hug, it turns out.

The farmers in our neighborhood gather for lunch at the Reality Bar in nearby Windham. Whoever named that place was teetering between irony and misrepresentation. The old boys come in off their tractors, perch on stools, and throw down hot shots. Hot blackberry brandy shots. Makes the afternoon go better. Helps with those long, cold days full of chores. Also explains the zig-zagging corn rows and the remarkable absence of a full set of fingers on half the people in Iowa County. Some guys can’t point and many wear their wedding rings on the right hand. I bet that's why farmers don’t wave-they just raise one finger from the steering wheel when you pass each other. Not that many can flash a rude gesture, now that I think about it.

There are some unique folks in the country. I myself have some retraining to do when  we move to town. No more walking the dogs in my PJs. No more hanging out clothes in my skivvies. (I like to wash all my clothes.) Probably no exhuming cows.

In the boonies, you might not exchange two words in two years. You might have to squint hard to see the community when people live miles apart, but before you even know you’re in big trouble, they materialize in pickups and on 4-wheelers and tractors, and you know it's there.

THE SENSE GOD GAVE A GOOSE

We were cruising the countryside with an old friend, fantasizing about home sites. I was channeling Goldilocks––this one’s got trees, but it’s too flat; that one is hilly, but it doesn’t have trees; that’s a nice creek, but it’s in the flood plain. That one is the Garden of Eden but with a hog confinement for a neighbor.

And then, I saw it. Wonderful meadows. A huge, mature woods. We parked the car and walked in, no mean feat the day after an ice storm when there’s no path. We came over the hill and––it was beyond our wildest dreams. There was a large pond and beyond that, wetlands. Near as I could tell, there was only one drawback: it wasn’t for sale.

Our realtor friend said he’d snoop around and find out who owned the land––maybe they’d sell off a few acres. But next morning, I opened the Iowa City paper and there, glaring out at me from the classifieds, was a detailed description of the very same property. For sale. Just posted. Other people were going to try to buy my land!

We were looking for 5 acres––it was 47 acres. We wanted to be 5-6 miles from town––it was 18 miles out. So we bought it.

Were we impulsive, or were we shrewd and flexible? Were we impractical or just exceptionally farsighted? There’s no doubt we were impulsive and impractical, and clueless and uninformed. We could add paragraphs to Roget’s list of synonyms for immature decision-making. Or maybe we had good intuition. And lotsa luck.

And oh, what we would have missed if we’d had our feet firmly planted on the ground. Like many memorable trips, this one was impulsive and life changing.

 

All that and the goose, too.

MASTER MORPHER

Rana Catesbeiana. What a beautiful name. Sounds like someone you went to high school with, right? Or a stripper at a bar in Shueyville. Didn't Tolstoy write about Rana Karenina? Actually, Rana catesbeiana sings to me every evening, my own basso profundo. When a chorus of Bullfrogs gets going, it can wake you from a sound sleep: barumba-rumba-rumba.

~Rana~

Rana C is a big, sturdy girl. Or boy. The American Bullfrog. I know we mothers are not supposed to have favorites, but I can cruise the perimeter of the pond for hours looking at these guys. My not-exactly-camouflaged kayak used to scare them, but they have gotten used to me, and I can coast to within a few yards before they ready those big back legs.

Nice gams!

Although I grew up on (more like in) a lake, I didn’t know how big a bullfrog could get. These fellas are 12-15 inches fully stretched out. They are a beautiful shade of green with handsome spots. And those hip bones? To die for. Frogs lack ribs, but they are well supported by those fantastic hipbones.

Bullfrogs have some very cool windows in their skulls. They can retract their eyes when they swim, pulling them down into little holes in the skull.

It's a girl

Is it a girl? If the eardrum is the size of the eye, yes. If it’s bigger, it’s a boy frog. Note: it’s not a bullfrog because it’s a boy. It’s a bullfrog because of its bellowing sound. There are female bullfrogs. In fact, they are bigger than the males. So there.

It's a boy

I always figured frogs moved their chins and throats because they were revving up to croak. In fact they move the bottom of their mouth up and down to bring in air, then they absorb oxygen through the lining of the mouth. They bring in oxygen through other skin as well.

Although frogs lay and fertilize tens of thousands of eggs, those are good fish food so we are saved from a plague of Rana catesbeiana. Those baby tads can hatch in days, and then begin their metamorphosis. Development time varies depending on climate and temperature, but it can be month or even years.

Our frogs have a constant supply of dragonflies. They wait so patiently while the dragons zip back and forth in front of their frog-noses, then snap forward and claim their dinner. They can jump 5-6 feet, and their underwater swimming is powerful, too, so they are very effective food gatherers. They will eat tadpoles, snails, snakes, birds, other frogs, turtles, mice, and other animals. They use their sticky tongue and their arms to get the unfortunate prey into the mouth. There are froggy teeth on the upper jaw and palate of a frog but not on the bottom. These are handy for holding the food in place, but the frog must stuff the food down its own throat. This behavior is also seen at Iowa City student hangouts on Thursday nights. Frogs also retract their eyes downward to help squeeze dinner out of the mouth and toward the stomach. That behavior is noted in students only after a really big football game.

I guess some people think all bullfrogs look alike, but look more closely. They each have their own beauty. And those eyes! Those lovely brown periscopes. I know what they’re thinking: “Wow, you guys all look alike.”

Time to restock the pond