Catch and Release

Almost immediately after we bought our house in the spring of 2006, my husband instituted a catch and release program. While he was in the basement cleaning the cat box for the first time, he heard a rustling over in the corner. He discovered a frog there, trapped in the slim dirt of the window well, its translucent belly pressed firmly into the glass, its legs kicking wildly as it tried to scramble up to freedom. As he came to discover, the grates over the window wells of our new home were small enough to keep people and full-grown pets from falling through, but too large for frogs and the occasional rodent.

Slowly, my husband cracked the window and scooped the frog into his hand. (It immediately peed as frogs do, their only defense from children of a certain age that are always picking them up and placing them in makeshift terrariums.) Trudging up the steps, he walked over to me where I sat on the couch watching the evening news to show me the brown/green, panting body clamped between his hands. I was in the midst of watching yet another depressing story flash across the TV screen-- fallen soldiers in Iraq, civilian deaths in Afghanistan, another attempted airplane sabotage, a senseless school shooting. Thankfully, he pulled me away and we knelt down on the step outside our slider and let the frog hop into the twilight damp grass of our new backyard, the hum of its brethren just beginning in the distance. This began my husband's nightly routine of checking the window wells for the twelve or so weeks of summer and every so often releasing a panicked and grateful animal back into our backyard.

As we watched the world plunge further into what often feels like an unprecedented time of violence, I was always impressed by this small act of kindness, this nightly ritual of putting a life all but lost back into the world.

Shortly before our daughter was born last April, an acquaintance asked me how I felt about bringing a child into a world filled with such violence. (Not exactly an appropriate question for someone eight and a half months pregnant.) Yet, this person had no children and the question gave me pause. Perhaps because it was the eve of spring, my answer was this story of my husband and the frogs in our basement.

Where there is hate and violence in the world, there is also peace and love. There is also generosity.

This spring, we will celebrate our daughter's first year of life. It has been a year filled with wonder and joy, peace and love, unprecedented generosity. Yet, it is still a world that holds inexplicable violence. This week's headlines riddled with its evidence-- Man Shoots Officers Outside Pentagon, Death Toll Rising Again in Iraq, and the worst (at least for parents) just down the street from our home-- 2 Students Injured in Deer Creek Middle School Shooting.

It is not yet spring and so my husband has yet to wander down into the basement to rescue one of his frogs, but the season will be here soon. The first breaths of it already felt in the widening of the afternoon. When it comes, the three of us will kneel down by the back slider to watch as the frog slides out from his open hands into a dark night, together in our gratitude