I had a new “oh, my family were the weird ones” moment recently: it seems no one else’s family celebrated Frog Night (the first warm rainy night of spring) by going down to the local vernal pool after dark to help the amphibians safely across the road and listening to the spring peepers. (We’d then go back in daytime later on to observe the egg masses, of course.)
Apparently “Frog Night” as a holiday is a thing my mother invented and not a widely-accepted idea, which is a shame because I’ve been referring to it as if it was for the past 30 years.
I met this old guy named Tim on a greyhound yesterday and he talked about his visit to a friends farm where he learned the best way to know when the last maple syrup boil could happen was to listen for the peepers. Apparently, once they started going it was a sign it wasn’t good for the trees to keep drawing syrup. Anyway so his friend sent him out to peepers check and he was walking through the woods listening for peepers and ran into ANOTHER old dude in the woods who just looked at him knowingly and was like, no peepers yet. There’s no like calendar date, or math equation, or other controlled way to know when to stop drawing maple syrup. just a bunch of guys in the woods listening for frogs.