Chapter III
Froggy and Eunice go stickfishing
It was a lazy summer afternoon when Froggy and Eunice were passing the time in their favorite garden sitting by the side of the goldfish pond stickfishing. As they poked around in the water doing not much of anything with their sticks, Eunice began to wonder.
“Froggy?”
“Yes Eunice.”
“Do you ever wish you lived under the water. You know…..like a REAL frog.”
Eunice had said “like a real frog” because she knew that Froggy was in fact a toad. A tree toad to be exact.
“Well,” said Froggy. “I think it would be nice to take a little dip now and then, but I don’t think I would want to actually LIVE in the water all the time. There are too many things that I would miss.”
“Like what?” asked Eunice, flipping little bits of slimy grass out of the pond with her stick.
“Like the swish, swish, swish of the maple leaves, and the crunch, crunch, crunchy feeling of acorns under my feet. And then there’s those little red clusters of buds that fall down and cover the sidewalks in the spring and those wonderful helicopter thingies that come twirling out of the trees.”
“Hmmm,” said Eunice. “Did you notice that all of the things you mentioned are things that fall out of trees?”
“Gee,” thought Froggy, as she sat scratching her head. “I guess that’s what makes me a TREE toad.” Froggy sat quietly for a moment slowly paddling her feet back and forth in the pond. Then suddenly she stopped and looked up with the bright clear expression of someone who has just found the misplaced mitten they had been searching for all winter in the sock drawer where it belonged in the first place. “There’s YOU, Eunice. I would definitely miss you, and YOU didn’t fall out of a tree.”
“Well, ACTually,” said Eunice, rubbing her backside gingerly and remembering the day she and Froggy had first met, “on several occasions I did.”
3.