Frog

After Bruce Holland Rogers’ “Dinosaur”

When she was very young, she’d hop around the house, hands on the floor, eyes bugging out, tongue darting, ribbit. “Heavens, Margaret, get up, you are not a frog,” her mother said. “You are a little girl.” Since she was not a frog—free to jump 100 feet or catch bugs with her long and sticky tongue or sing so she could be heard for miles—she thought for a while she was a princess. “Honey,” her father said, one day after piano lessons, “what do you want to be? A teacher? A nurse? Do you want to work with me in insurance?” She wasn’t sure. Maybe a secretary or a stewardess.

In school they encouraged her to become a teacher. For a long time, she reigned in classrooms. From a towering condo near the Mississippi River, she also wrote about her life and all its riches. Then she began having trouble with the computer, hearing her students, and remembering sometimes what she’d just told them.

One day in early spring, exhausted, on a walk along the river, she forgot what her mother had told her. She forgot she was not a frog. She plopped down on a park bench and planted her feet, splayed like webbed claws in her boots. She bent over, tucked up one knee (the other needed to be replaced), opened her eyes wide, (lifting heavy folds of skin), unlocked her mouth, breathed deep. She extended her liver spotted hands over all she saw: the city with its buildings and bridges; shores of tall grasses and trees; islands of sedge and shrub; swimming ducks, flying geese. A dancing damselfly. She leaped up, bounded over the bank, to rocks, logs, and the water beyond. Ribbit.