It’s been a pretty depressing time of late, with water woes, load-shedding and the awful condition of our roads. If you don’t mind, I am going to attempt to lighten the mood just a bit. I can understand if you really don’t feel like being in a good mood, that’s okay.
Anyway, we’ve often been told the way to gauge the health of an eco-system is to see how the frogs are doing. Our garden must be in reasonable shape because we certainly have frogs. The problem with that, my wife likes to remind me, is they are usually followed by snakes. For the farmers, snake catcher Sarel van der Merwe and other adventurers, this doesn’t seem to pose much of an issue, but for city sort-of slickers it’s a very real problem.
Our area, the wonderful leafy suburb of Umtentweni, is still without water – I’ve lost count of the days now. We are pumping water out of the pool into the tank and on into the house. (This at the time of writing, seems it’s back on now, but for how long!) It’s resulted in what I call a Chad Le Clos cologne, or more specifically, we all have a slight chlorine scent (odour?)
It also resulted in one of our amphibian friends getting stuck in the pool as the water level dropped. I fished him out with the pool net, but he was back the next day, this time spotted by the children, who are aged nine and seven. The blessed frog had somehow gotten into the little square area where the ‘kreepy krawly’ pipe goes in.
There was no way he was getting out of that, not even via the beak of a bird, so we had to help. But I was needed inside, to help with our little lockdown surprise, who is now a very boisterous boy of seven months, with a serious case of FOMO (fear of missing out). In desperation, I said I’d give R100 to whichever child got the frog out of the pool, thinking my money would be safe.
About five minutes later the daughter came racing into the house to announce that she had succeeded in rescuing the frog.
“Where is he now?” I asked.
“He’s still in the net at the end of the pole,” she replied.
Okay then.
She asked me to flip him out of the net, which I did so, while she sprinted away in case I flipped it on her, apparently like Oupa has done to mom before!
The brother? He didn’t do much more than supervise. He’ll try run through players in a game of rugby but don’t ask him to deal with creepy crawlies or anything similar.
Anyway, I forgot about the R100 until a few days later, when the wife sent me out shopping for the usual bread and milk. (She buys the nappies).
As I was going out, my daughter said “Dad, don’t forget about the buffalo!”
“Sorry, what?”
“The R100 you owe me.”
Oh yes, of course. Clearly has mom’s business acumen. That can only be a good thing, although my wallet may disagree right now.
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