As I put in the comments section for this article on The Burning Platform: An oasis of rationality in a desiccated desert of deranged, deluded, degenerate, and demented despair. From Hardscrabble Farmer at theburningplatform.com:
The tree frogs are at again tonight. They have become one of my favorite annual rites, their appearance somewhere near the middle of sugaring season and peaking at the time when the fiddle head ferns start to poke up from their corms. They start up all at once, every evening after the Sun has dropped below the mountain to the west. Singular, then in chorus, it rises and falls in waves over time, like the sound at the beach, chirp, chirp, chirp, in threes and then coming to a full stop for no apparent reason.
After a while you can pick out specific frogs at a certain distance, his voice clear and rhythmic, a single note in the falling darkness. I listen to them before bed for as long as I can before drifting off to sleep, the window cracked just enough to hear their nightly concert and think how fortunate I am to experience this sensation, of listening in to another species as it acts out its biological imperative. They don’t care what it sounds like to me, but it’s beautiful just the same.
I spent the day in the garden. It was cloudy for the most part with a steady breeze from the south. The windmill cranked slowly in the warm air as I flipped the beds with a spading fork, one clod of black earth at a time. I gathered all the bone dry stalks of corn and sunflowers that had been left through the Winter and piled it into a heap. I lit it with a single match and it went up instantly, the smell of smoke and small ashes floated across the dooryard while I flipped clods of black soil onto themselves.
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