A visitation

Last night I was dreaming of a Japanese calligraphy brush, the big bamboo kind that's as long as your forearm, with the soft fat wad of black hair bristles. Someone had dipped it into a big pot of ink, and then blopped a big round ink blot on the left side of my throat. I reached up to feel the spot and my fingers touched something ... cold and wet ... and moving ...

I instinctively flung the thing out into the room, then realized I was awake. It only took a second or two to know what had happened; then I rolled over and turned on the light, and met my middle-of-the-night visitor: a tiny brown Pacific tree frog, with glistening skin and gently pulsing throat, sitting with its adorable little fingers splayed out on either side of the head of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov (well, the portrait of him on the cover of an ancient paperback).

This is not the first time I've been visited by frogs in the night. One of the windows in my room doesn't have a screen, and I think that's where they come in – late in the evening, when my reading lamp brings them to the window to catch the little bugs that are also attracted to the light.

The frogs' attraction to light is also compelling and intense. I picked this little one up and took her to the kitchen, to send her out the dog door – and as soon as she was outside, she crawled up to the little tear in the corner of the plastic door and hopped right back in. To get her to leave, I had to turn off the lamp in my room and then turn on the one on the back porch. That got her attention right away, and she sailed out the open door and into the light without a moment's hesitation.

Possibly there is some kind of metaphor for faith in this little story. Maybe it really is just instinct that compels a frog to move toward light, without any thought or reason. Or maybe faith is itself an instinct.

Sometimes, I suppose, a frog is just a frog.