If You Build It, They Will Come

“Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Go to Pharaoh and say to him, ‘This is what the LORD says: Let my people go, so that they may worship me. If you refuse to let them go, I will plague your whole country with frogs.” (Exodus 8:1-2)

If I was Pharaoh, I’m not sure this would’ve been considered a punishment in my eyes. Perhaps Pharaoh didn’t either because, as I remember from Scripture, he didn’t let the Lord’s people go…and in came the frogs. God’s word is true.

I also didn’t built “it”…not intentionally anyway.

A couple of autumns ago, I drained the kiddie pool with which my ducks used to swim. As always, once drained for the winter, I propped it up against the outside wall of the barn to keep the rain from pooling up inside and then freezing, thus, possibly cracking the “pond”. Well, winter winds and/or heavy snows knocked the pool facedown. The following spring, the pool was full of water, but upside down.

Said kiddie pool is quite large, and especially heavy with all that water pooled up on it. The drain is now at the “top”. And, it seems like every time I start bailing the water out of it, we get more rain and it refills. This past spring, I started to bail and noticed some frog eggs amidst the dead leaves and duckweed floating on top of the stagnant water so I left it alone. Come summer and on into fall, I’ve had quite a number of tadpoles swimming around in that “pond”.

This weekend, friend Robert came over to help reinstall the inside door to the basement. There was a point where he needed to use the skill saw, which would produce a lot of sawdust in a small and confining place, so he recommended I step outside until he was done.

I wandered over to the chicken coop to visit with the chooks and ducks (Incidentally, the ducks have been given smaller pools that are easier to manage…there are also fewer ducks these days).

Then I wandered over to the upside-down pool-turned-vernal-pool. The tadpoles have either been eaten by the family of stoats we discovered living under the Florida room floor, have morphed into their adult selves, or have gone deeper since a recent frost (Do tadpoles hibernate like their adult counterparts? Or do they die off in the cold?). However, I found three rather large frogs, and another that looked to be either a juvenile, or perhaps simply another smaller species of frog (or are some of these toads??).

No matter, I am thrilled with my new neighbors and now spend every evening visiting. A vernal pool was in the “future” plans for this homestead; what a blessing to find Mother Nature produced it herself.

May God bless you & keep you!