I grew up on a grain farm (important expositional information). When I was a kid I remember when, every spring, the frogs in the dugouts would wake with the thaw. Their songs would echo over the flat, wet-yet-icy landscape. No ears were safe from their symphonies: even inside the house I could hear them heralding the spring.

This was the way things were forever, basically. This was the marker of spring.
So you can imagine the sinking feeling I felt in my gut one year in high school when there was no frogsong.
I was standing at the end of the driveway waiting for the schoolbus to pick me up. As most teens at the time, I had earbuds connected to an MP3 player in my pocket, listening to some garbage music I thought made me cool (I have never been "cool" a day in my life). Alt-rock or something like that.
I took out my earbuds and realized how quiet it was. Weren't the frogs supposed to be out by now? That silence persisted for years.
Fast forward to a few years ago. I moved to Halifax to start grad school and I started thinking about those frogs. For what reason? No idea. I just remembered that shocking silence one day.
I started making these lumpy forms: these little bean-like organisms with far too many legs and no discernable head. I called these "frogs" because they were a form born of this story. They were clearly not frogs, but maybe these were what the frogs became - mouthless wanderers. Maybe that's why the springs were silent.
After some digging (research, trying to remember what was going on around that time, talking to family members) I realized something. Around the time the frogs disappeared there was an army worm infestation in that region of Manitoba. Army worms are the larval form of a moth. They're green little grubby things and they consume everything from trees to canola.

In a community where the economy is based in grain agriculture, you can imagine the apocalyptic-level-terrible situation that these worms presented. It was a terrible year for new pants (something we say when the crops don't yield well). Naturally, to prevent crops from dying and all the trees in the region from sporting bare limbs, pesticides were sprayed. Then there were no army worms, but we also lost the frogs.
Now, I don't have scientific proof or a particularly great memory, but my thought is that the use of pesticides also affected the frog populations. Now, ten years later (give or take), the frogs have returned to their former glory.
These are not the frogs I grew up with. The same species, yes, but these are of a different generation. These frogs are the descendants of those who survived the army-worm-apocalypse of 10 years ago or so. They are the same, yet different. A reflection of adaptation amid dire circumstances.
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