Ricket, Racket and Roppit: Three tiny frogs, or, a worldwide movement

In the first few weeks of quarantine we knew we needed a project. The kids were bouncing around trying to figure out distance learning tools, home with parents on weekdays and a total lack of social life.

We had an old pond liner that had been collecting muck in the back yard, victim to yet another well intentioned free acquisition from Craigslist. I mean, … you can’t beat the price, right?

We dug up the pond, relocated it and cobbled together pieces of several old fountains, and relocated rocks from our hideously extensive collection gleaned from day and camping trips to every corner of California in all its mountainous, sandy, rocky, desertified, beachy glory.

When we were done, we sat back and watched. The birds in the tree began to bathe, daintily taking turns at the preferred spot in a hilariously polite dance. The bees arrived, and we giggled, watching their little bee butts wiggle while they sipped water from the leaves of one of the succulents we planted beside the pond. But best of all were the frogs.

We had imported a few fence frogs/tree frogs before, and we have a neighbor with a never-fully-drained empty swimming pool, so we were not strangers to the sound of frogs. In fact, I bemoaned a long absence of the frogs in the spring.  I had resigned myself to believing that enthusiastic overuse of Roundup by lawn-slaves over the years had decimated our local population that used to fill the creek down the street with a cacophony of urgent calls: Mate with me. Mate with me. I want to live, I want my progeny to live. I want to pass on my DNA. The urgent, ancient, primal call that every living being answers: the desire to live, and to keep living.

The new revamped pond turned out to be considered five-star accommodations in frogdom, and almost instantly, right around dusk, the three of them began their predictable rhythmic chorus.

A lone high, plaintive voice would spiral up in the pre-twilight, when the house shadow begins to loom long.

Riiicket?

A long pause, and then again.

Riiicket.

There is no answer, and you’d think he is gone, and then, he’d get real brave and loud, and say

RICKET.

Then, suddenly,

Racket! Would say his little compadre (they are surprisingly tiny for the amount of noise they make.)

Ricket!

Racket!

Ricket Racket! Ricket Racket! It became a phrase, a duet, a refrain.

And after a while the third would join in, lower and slower, Rahhhhpit. Then it got faster, Roppit. Roppit, Roppitroppitroppit.

And the neighbor’s rainwater puddle at the bottom of their pool would answer with a few voices, then there were a hundred, and the whole neighborhood would curse the lack of sleep with the chorus of a million frog voices singing desperately, urgently, again and again and again until someone who could change their situation might hear.

George Floyd’s death happened when the nation, unquiet, anxious with the dread of the inevitable dusk of our own existence, the terror of the invisible enemy, was ready to speak.

And the nation said, I want to live.

I want to breathe.

And soon, the voices that kept repeating were multiplied, echoed, repeated, restrengthened, restored with song and cheers and small bits of kindness and the burning fire within that repeats, again and again: I. WANT. TO. LIVE.