It’s still several weeks until Halloween, and already the creatures of the night have come calling.
Our first visitor last night was that toad — as big as a tennis ball — who likes to sit next to the screen door just outside the back door. He’s been showing up now and then just after sunset to sit in the same spot, and for the life of me I can’t figure out what he wants.
He squats at the top of the wooden ramp I built so my wife’s wheelchair can roll smoothly from the house to her garden. We like to go out there at night to take a bit of fresh air before we hit the sack, and I always have to check first to make sure we don’t squash him under foot or wheel.
Does the touch of wood on the toad’s warty bottom feel better than bricks or dirt? Or does the wood hold just the right temperature after dark that makes it the best toady hangout in town?
We’ve been leaving the glass slider open, so there’s nothing but a thin layer of screen separating that toad from our living room. Is it the domestic call of indoor air wafting through the door, too cozy for a toad to resist? Maybe he has a hankering for the aroma of whatever we had for dinner, calling out to him, luring him to the screen door? And if that’s what brings him around every night, is it a compliment to your culinary arts to say, “Toads love it”?
Or maybe it has nothing to do with the scent or feel of the air wafting through the screen. Maybe he just wants a peek inside, because from the very top of that wooden ramp the toad has an ideal view of the TV through the screen door. Maybe he’s waiting for us to stop watching movies or sitcoms, and to flip to the political coverage on CNN, which seems like ideal fare for the cold-of-blood crowd. (Or maybe — just maybe — was it watching too much of this year’s political horror-show that turned him into a toad in the first place…?)
In any case, he shows up so often that the dog hardly takes notice of him. I’ll slide the screen door open, Diva will greet the toad with a courtesy sniff, then ramble off to do her business. The toad will politely hop down from the ramp to sit next to the planter holding the geraniums and sweet potato vines, and after Diva has done her duty and come back inside, the toad will hop back up from the bricks to take his position at the top of the ramp once more, gazing through the screen door, possibly waiting for Wolf Blitzer or some other CNN denizen to show up on our TV.
Then again, maybe the toad is just seeking sanctuary from the other creatures of the night that have come calling in our yard lately, because every morning I wake up to examine what new damage those nocturnal nasties have done to the lawn.
Every morning, right behind my wife’s garden, the grass looks as if I spent the night practicing chip shots with my pitching wedge. But no jury in the land would convict me of somnolent divot damage if my defense attorney would show them a video of me on the links trying to hit the green from a dozen yards out. My lawyer would cry dramatically: “Does this look like a man who has ever had ANY practice with a pitching wedge?” The judge would gavel the case closed.
No, I’m not the one digging divots in my sleep. It is some sort of creature of the night, maybe an army of them, rooting up the lawn behind my wife’s garden.
“Grubs,” Matt the landscape guy said when I saw him spreading some kind of chemical on the neighbor’s yard. “The skunks love ‘em.”
But I think I’d know if it was skunks rooting around in the yard for grubs. After all, I sleep with the windows open, and I think I’d know it if an army of skunks were bobbing for beetle-babies just a sniff away outside the bedroom screen.
It might be raccoons. They’re pretty stealthy, and their tiny Trumpian hands would be perfectly suited for grub-grubbing. Or maybe it’s opossums. (Opossi? That’s the kind of thing that keeps an old English teacher up at night.) I don’t know what opossi eat for a midnight snack, but I’ll bet their breath smells grubby. I’ll take your word for it if you tell me it smells like something else.
Because maybe — just maybe — those mysterious diggers-of-the-lawn have breath that smells like toads. Maybe it’s not only grubs they’re grubbing around for. Maybe it’s dreams of warty amphibian sirloins and chops that really get their mouths watering.
And maybe that’s why our gnarly little visitor comes each night to sit at the top of the ramp just outside the screen door, terrified, begging us to invite him inside, where the only creature of the night to contend with is a fluffy white Shi-tzu-poo who doesn’t seem to care much one way or the other.
Anyway, it’s a thought to consider. You could do worse than a toad if you had to choose a creature of the night to cuddle up with on a dark night in October. Trust me.
If you don’t believe me, just turn on CNN and see for yourself.
