Strange Creatures

The summer sun is here, although too busy with getting ready that it hardly comes out. Rain has been a more reliable friend these days. High up in the mountains, freezing and spreading itself thin, it dusted and, at least temporarily, soothed the melting glaciers. While down here, in the Valley of Chamonix and all along the Arve River, its hypnotising plink plunk has been setting the rhythm of the days.

My motivation to do anything has been up and down like a woodpecker’s flight. I took another sip of my second cup of tea that morning, and looked outside.

At the corner of my eye I noticed something moving.
I refocused my gaze on to my little garden. A pair of eyestalks stretched slowly from the middle of the verbena plant.

“Damn them snails!” – I sighed and walked out to save my poor verbena.

I trapped the snail into a pot and covered it with a stone. Then,
I went back inside put on my flowery trousers, sapphire blue water-repellent shoes and grass green rain jacket. At the door,
I grabbed my red umbrella with black dots in one hand and stepped outside. I closed the door and picked up the pot with the little criminal.

Once I reached the nearest field I released the snail. A few cows were laying in the field and I felt their judgmental lazy gaze. They had seen me releasing snails into the same field day after day. I tried to ignore them and looked up. In the forest’s vapours and the mirrors of the water-glazed rocks, a bizarre world was shaping. Suddenly curious of it, I decided to go for a morning walk.

I followed the sluggish black streets towards the river, and that’s where I saw her! Pink and huge, it was hard not to notice her. She was marching impressively fast despite her little legs.
I got closer. It was taking the caterpillar only a few seconds to crawl her way a distance the length of my shoe. Looking at this strange creature made me remember a friend of mine who had a ski accident recently and badly broke his leg. Standing on two legs had been giving us nothing but trouble ever since we had done it.

The caterpillar’s shameless colours, on the other hand, I found to be ridiculous. It could have done with some modesty. Then again, what did I know, maybe she was pretending to be plastic and trying to convince predators that there is less substance to her than it’s worth targeting.

On my way back I met the others. Despite the planet shifting from its axis uncontrollably towards the right, a huge family moved into the nearby wild campsite. They made a swimming pool out of the puddles. The smaller ones seemed a bit aimless and hyper. They must have been worried about catching up with life now that they finally found a place with enough water. I noticed that one was stuck in the outskirt mud. I thought about helping it, but quickly found that I knew too little about it to do so effectively. Its slimy swollen body lost its shape and pulling it out of the mud might have only increased the damage.

I remembered the statistics that I read somewhere, which said, that only about 1 in 5 tadpoles turn into strong frogs anyway. Most tadpoles get eaten by other animals, others lack growth hormone to change into anything more mature and then some, like this one, just wander off into the mud.

No idea if the numbers are right. However, I never seen many frogs around here. I always liked numbers though. They provide simple representations of a complex universe. You can tell someone that life is beautiful or tell them that if they choose to kill themselves, the chance of someone in their family, especially younger, following their example would increases by 2.5 times. It might have been better for the tadpole to do aimless rounds in the middle of the water like everyone else.

Maybe the tadpoles turn into frogs and move into the forest in the middle of the night. Like the frog prince but in reverse. I’m sure it is safer in the forest for them but It’s a shame that they don’t ever come back to tell us about their castles. I’d find that more interesting than hearing about friends flipping barns and vans into homes.

On that thought I went back inside my tiny home to pack. I had made plans with my friend Carrie to go climbing that day.
As the forecast was, once again, for even more rain with possible thunderstorm, we decided to head to the sheltered overhanging cliffs at Le Fayet.

The brutally steep rock was proving hard to climb, resulting in grunts and swears that started flying around with the mosquitoes.

Stupid ledge! Bzzzzz, bzzzz.

What the HELL?! Bzzz, bzz, BZZZZ.

I was quickly covered with mosquito bites and wished there were any frogs here to eat them. Then some excited barking started breaking into this wonderful mix. A group of climbers appeared from behind the trees and joined us. They brought with them a dog, which on arrival, got straight away into the business of running in circles around big rocks and barking at them.

Taco stop it, come here!

Stupid dog! Bzzzzz, bzz.

He is just getting mad at the rocks. What the HELL?! Bzzz, bzz, BZZZZ.

Before this party got any wilder, we decided to stop disturbing the lizards, that sheltered in the dry corners of the crag,
and headed home before anything more terrible appeared.

The clean room welcomed me. I felt like writing about the day. Once I finished shaping the memories to my satisfaction, I was ready to relax in my soft bed. I put the laptop away, reached for the bed light, and met with 8 eyes staring at me.

A huge spider had been reading my notes from the wall beside my head. I heard that Spiders have quite bad vision but
I wondered if this one was seeing eyes to eye with me on this. That, contrary to what Virginia Woolf thought, a woman does not need a room of her own to write fiction.

Foot note: All events in this story might or might have not happened in a non-chronological order.