How to Catch a Frog

by Heather Ross

  We spent almost every weekend with Yia Yia when we lived in Virginia, and our lessons in handwork continued. Yia Yia and I grew further apart, but Grandpa and I were a team. He loved us and cared for us in a way that no other adult had, and when I was with him I felt smart and pretty and good. Then our father, who was by then only thirty and barely able to make a living, much less care for two little girls without so much help from his parents, was accepted into the University of California, Santa Cruz, and announced that when we came back to him in the fall, it would be to a new home in California. Our grandparents were devastated. We spent a final weekend with them, during a muggy early June, and ate a dinner of Greek pot roast on their upstairs terrace, looking down over the patchwork of lawns all separated by chain-link fences. After the sun went down you could not see the fences anymore, but you could still make out the perfect boundaries between properties because of the varying color and shortness of the grass, still visible in the near dark.

  We spent the summer in Vermont with our mother and then, when fall came, boarded a plane and met our father in California. He married not long after, to a woman who barely tolerated us, and had a son. This wife and I could not stand one another, and a few years later, just before I turned fourteen and as our annual visit to see our mother the following summer came to an end, I enrolled in high school in Vermont. My mother had no phone, so I had no way of telling my father that I wasn’t coming back; I just didn’t get on the plane. My stepmother was elated; my father and I wouldn’t speak for years. Christie stayed in California with our father, barely tolerated by his new wife, but becoming like a second mother to his new son, our little half-brother. She put herself through college, married when we were only twenty-one, and had three children. I came back to the West Coast after college to be closer to her and her growing family. When her oldest daughter, who was the first child that I loved, was a small and pretty thirteen, she was finally allowed to get her ears pierced. We drove to the shopping mall, where a gum-chewing teenager put a velvet-covered board dotted with metal beads in front of her. I pushed her to get the silver, not the gold. She wanted so badly to have pierced ears, to be officially a teenager, but when she saw the gun, she froze. I still didn’t have holes in my ears, all of those years since that drive to Tyson Corners, so I offered to go first.

  A few winters ago, my friend Denyse gave me a remarkable gift. I don’t know where she found it, but she sent me a ball of unwashed wool, tied up loosely in string, meant to be hung in the branches of a tree. The idea is that birds of all kinds will find it and pull bits of the wool through the strings and fly back to their nests, where they will weave it between the sticks and grasses. I hung it on a high branch with the help of two little girls who were far better tree climbers than I, now almost an old person, and have watched from my kitchen window as it grows smaller and smaller, disappearing, bit by bit, into my woods.

  Bird netting, which is designed to protect trees and their fruit from birds, works here to enclose a small ball of the perfect nesting material—wool roving or fleece. You’ll need a small ball of wool roving or fleece, a 2' x 2' (61 x 61 cm) square of netting, string for closing, and at least 30' (9 m) rope for hanging. To begin, make a loose, round ball of wool and place it in the center of the square of netting. Gather up the edges of the netting, then the corners, and use string to bind closed the top end. To hang, tie one end of a long rope around a rock or other heavy item. Make sure the rope is secure. Stand directly under the branch where you want to hang your nest bundle (make sure it is a place where it can be reached by a bird standing on a nearby branch, as larger birds won’t be able to balance on it long enough to pull bits of wool out), then take 10 steps backward. Throw the rock over the branch, leaving a loose pile of rope in front of you. This may take a few attempts. When you have succeeded and the rope is over the branch and the rock is safely on the ground again, remove the rock from the rope’s end and replace it with your wool bundle, tying it securely. Use the other end of your rope to hoist it into place, then tie the loose end of the rope around the tree’s trunk, knotting it in a way that can be easily undone.

  HOW TO

  make a warm bed

  WE HAD BEEN TRYING TO GET Beth Johnson’s mother to let Beth spend the night at the schoolhouse since the first day of first grade. The Johnsons were really more friends of my mother’s parents than of my mother, even though Beth’s mom was close in age to my own. Beth and her parents and her four brothers and sisters lived in the same resort community that my grandparents did, a place called Alpine Haven. Alpine Haven consisted of forty or so chalet-style homes, all chocolate and white with flower boxes and stucco foundations, nestled into the forest on the backside of a ski area that served mostly upper-middle-class French Canadians. The Johnsons lived at Alpine Haven year-round, which almost nobody did, and they sent their kids to the local public schools. Beth and my sister and I were in the same grade.

  Beth’s mother’s name was Margaret. She wore her auburn hair long and had thick, lumpy eyelashes. She dressed in brightly colored pantsuits with bell-bottoms and shirts with wide, pointy collars and ankle boots with heels. Margaret claimed proudly not to be a “working mother” but made a tidy little income collecting used children’s clothing and selling it to women like my grandmother, who would conspire with her to organize ridiculous, outdated wardrobes for my sister and me and our cousins. When we visited her house for tedious trying-on sessions, she made great efforts to steer us away from her velvet turquoise sectional sofa, which apparently was very expensive and important. Once, when she walked my grandmother to her waiting car and left us for a moment, we ran to it and sat on it, just wearing our underpants. “It’s like it’s made of bunnies!” my sister said to me. “Lots and lots of bunnies!” I felt certain that our grandmother was allowed to sit on it, but I had never seen her or anyone else do so. We saw the way that Beth’s mother treated our grandmother, with respect and sweetness, and then the way she treated our mother and us, and suspected, based on the difference, that she was pretending to be a good person but that actually she was not.

  The Johnsons went to church. A lot. They talked about God all the time, about what he wanted us to be doing and not doing and how he was always watching. Sometimes, on Sundays in the summertime, Beth would walk from her house to the Alpine Haven swimming pool, still dressed in her church clothes, with her long, thick auburn hair tied up out of her face with ribbons. She would sit on the steps that led to the pool and watch us swim with her chin resting in her hands. We knew that she wasn’t allowed to do anything fun on Sundays because she was supposed to be resting. We would tell her that nobody was watching and that she could at least take off her shoes and kneesocks, and that she would still be resting, but she couldn’t be persuaded. I felt certain that she was wrong. I was happy to believe in—even appreciate—a God at the age of six, because at that point in my life everything about the natural world seemed to be the product of intelligent design: the perfect clear pool beneath the waterfall just behind our house, the tiny, sweet strawberries that covered acres of horse meadow across our dirt road, the apple trees made for climbing and hanging from by one’s knees, the cool green grass that grew and grew and grew. We saw spring happen every year, under our feet, bringing with it daffodils and soft kittens born in my sweater drawer and wild roses. All of this seemed miraculous to me and, because science had not yet wrecked it for all of us, like definite proof of God. I didn’t know yet that the mossy trail worn in the mud and grass that led to the river from our yard had been made by hundreds of people before me, or that wise men had long ago forced apple trees to grow small so that their fruit could be easily reached, or that the roses in our woods, now wild but once cultivated, were all that remained of a cabin that had burned down a century before. I didn’t know that there was an explanation for almost everything. I thought it was extremely silly of Margaret Johnson to think that God had time to keep track of what each and every person was doing during the weekend. If God wan
ted me to do anything differently, he didn’t mention it, and based on what I knew about his work, he didn’t really seem like the type of person who would be angry at me for going swimming on a Sunday, especially a really muggy one.

  My sister and I didn’t know that it was the Johnsons who sent the missionaries to our house, but my mother must have suspected it. We liked the two nice ladies who started to appear regularly in our driveway in their clean little car—they brought us books and played games with us. Their names were Anna and Hannah, which we thought was a riot. We could never remember which one was which. We did impressions of them after they left that made my mother laugh so hard that no noise came out. Hannah had a huge bottom, so my sister would put on a pair of our mother’s wool tights, stuff a pillow into the back of them, stand on the coffee table, and try to remember one of the many pious sayings that Hannah and Anna loved to use. “Treat undo others better than they treat you!” and “Never do anything today that can be put off until never!” My mother had wanted to shoo them away at first, but we assured her that we liked them, and we didn’t have many visitors, so they were, at worst, a novelty. She began to look at them as babysitters, and when they came over, she would put a glass of something in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other and step backward out the front door, pushing it open with her elbow. She would sit on the porch or work in the garden, and she wouldn’t come back until she heard their car pull away.

  It must have been the missionaries who finally convinced Margaret Johnson to let Beth spend the night at our house. We had begged and pleaded and asked and demanded for more than a year, and even when Margaret Johnson finally said yes, we knew that she was wary, but we thought we had finally worn her down. We could see the concern in her face when she brought Beth, holding her small, rolled-up sleeping bag under one arm, and they both looked around inside our little one-room schoolhouse, with a small bedroom and bathroom added onto the back. Our ceilings were very high, and there were big windows on every wall with wavy glass in the panes. My mother’s bed was in one corner, near the potbelly woodstove that was our one source of heat. In another corner was our kitchen, which was really just a stove and a sink and a long wooden bar that someone had taken out of an old saloon. The rest of the space was filled with furniture that had been cast off and collected and with my mother’s paintings, plants, and cats. Our blankets and dishes were from Mexico, where we had lived for a while, and our chairs were rattan and from Indonesia, where my mother had spent much of her childhood. Margaret and Beth looked around, not saying a word. We could see that Beth was scared—we were children and knew those signs—but we pulled her in and made her laugh and showed her where Teddy slept under the stove and made her touch his tail, which was as hot as could be, and we made spaghetti and threw the noodles against the wall to see if they were ready, and then we climbed into my mother’s bed to watch The Waltons on our tiny black-and-white TV under stacks of wool blankets with the cat nearly suffocating us. It became very, very cold, and my mother added more wood than usual to the fire. We wondered if Beth was allergic when she started sneezing but decided that it was just the dust that she wasn’t used to. My mother made us Swiss Miss cocoa, which she never did, and we all fell asleep almost as soon as the boring news came on. My mother put us into our beds, tucking Beth in next to my sister, probably because I was so much bigger and there would be more room in her bed. Then she sat near the stove drinking wine, knitting the second mitten of a pair for me.

  We woke up in the arms of firemen. I could feel something scratchy and cold against my face, and when I opened my eyes I saw the chin and shoulder of a man with a big hat on. He was wearing enormous gloves and a coat that felt like it was made of metal. There was a man in front of me who seemed to be wearing the same kind of coat, and resting on one of his shoulders was the sleeping face of my sister; on the other shoulder was Beth, her eyes open, big, and full of tears. There was a noise all around us, a thundering, cracking sound, like a cat stuck inside a paper bag, or a rushing waterfall, and the air felt like it did when you were sitting in front of a bonfire and the wind suddenly shifted, and the thick rope of white smoke went into your face. The firemen were walking fast, and suddenly we were outside, looking up at a clear sky full of stars and half a moon and the thick gray smoke that was billowing from our roof. The air was clean but so bitterly cold that we choked on it until tears streamed down our faces. They put us into the fire truck’s front seat with our blankets over us and the heat blowing on us. The truck faced the road, but I could look past my sister and Beth and see through the window as my mother and our neighbors dragged everything that we owned through our front door and into the snow. The passenger-side door would open every few minutes and a fireman would toss a frightened cat into our laps. Plum, our plump favorite, clung to my chest with her front claws. I buried my face in her neck and smelled soot and smoke, but not the kind that comes from a woodstove.

  It was so cold that night that the firemen’s equipment wouldn’t work properly. They ran hoses from their truck to our well, where they tried to pump water into their pressurized systems, but the hoses were too long because our house was too far from the road, and they kept freezing. By the time they were able to spray water onto our roof, most of it had burned away. My mother had caught the fire very early when she heard what she thought were raccoons on our roof. She pulled on her boots and went outside to check, and when she looked up at our chimney, she saw that a cinder had found its way up our flue and had landed on the roof, which was on fire. We had no phone, so she ran in her nightgown and unlaced boots down our icy dirt road to our neighbor’s house, where she called the volunteer fire department.

  We had only been in the truck a few minutes when Margaret Johnson appeared before us. Our road had been purposely blocked just before our driveway by one of the fireman’s cars, so she was on foot when she reached the truck where we sat. She appeared suddenly, running into the headlights of the fire truck, out of the darkness like a ghost, tears streaming down her face, her long hair trailing behind her. Beth began to cry again as soon as she saw her, and then she was climbing over my sister and putting her arms around her mother’s neck and leaving us and her blanket behind. Margaret didn’t look at us or ask if we were OK. She didn’t find my mother or speak to anyone. She pulled Beth up onto her chest and walked back toward her car, burying her face in Beth’s neck and holding her as tightly as she could. We could see Beth’s face over her shoulder, moving away from us and finally fading into the darkness. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized that we would not be going back into our house and waking up to bowls of cereal in our pajamas and then going back to our pretend games on the wood floor next to the woodstove. It may not have been possible for my mind to grasp what had happened to our home, but the sadness that our sleepover was over was paralyzing. Plum moved off my lap and into the warm spot that remained. We were there for a long time and finally fell asleep curled up together, me and my sister and the cats.

  I do not know what my grandparents paid Margaret Johnson to invite us to live with her while our house was being repaired, but it must have been a lot. There was surely some sort of payment made, and perhaps some pressure from Margaret’s church, which was already invested in and familiar with our situation. Still, why my mother agreed is the bigger mystery. At first we were excited about the spacious rumpus room, with its enormous color television, but then we learned that it was only to be watched at certain times, and under certain conditions, and with our feet on the floor and not on the couch, and with no snacks or other food. It was to remain, it seemed to me, rumpus-free. And when someone changed the channel, you did not shout “GOD, why did you do THAT?” the way you did in our house, because God’s name was not to be used “in vain,” a term that I wished someone would explain to me. Meals were served with great ceremony and what felt to us like sadness and guilt, and with their own set of bizarre regulations. Every room had its own set of rules, so the easiest thing to do was to just stay in on
e place. My sister and I would sit on my mother’s borrowed bed in the basement and listen for mealtime announcements, given over the house’s intercom system. Beth seemed to avoid us, until her mother prompted her to give us each a gift of a new hairbrush and a package of barrettes. She asked if we would like her to show us how to put up our hair at each corner, over our ears, the way she wore hers, and when we politely declined, she left the room in relief.

  Our mother was going up to our house, which sat lonely and cold with tarps thrown over the holes in the roof, almost every day to feed our cats, who were not allowed at the Johnsons’ house. We convinced her to let us go with her once, by promising not to let it make us sad. When we got there, Plum came running out the front door, which was now propped permanently open with snow surrounding it on all sides, to greet us with loud purrs and by wrapping herself around our ankles. I wanted to sit on the ground and let her curl up in my lap and scratch her head, but I was wearing a winter coat that didn’t belong to me—it was from Margaret’s collection of clothing that was for sale and we had not paid her for it yet, so I was afraid to get it dirty.