Cross Creek by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

I do not profess to know all there is to know about frogs, lizards, ants and varmints. I have learned enough, however, in years of enforced intimacy, to turn them from aliens into friends, or at least into bowing acquaintances. I should have been prepared to like frogs. One who has heard a northern spring come in on that silver chorus should make decent obeisance to the singers and all their related family. The frog Philharmonic of the Florida lakes and marshes is unendurable in its sweetness. I have lain through a long moonlit night, with the scent of orange blossoms palpable as spilled perfume on the air, and listened to the murmur of minor chords until, just as I have wept over the Brahms waltz in A flat on a master's violin, I thought my heart would break with the beauty of it. If there is not a finished tune, there are phrases, and there is assuredly a motif, articulated, reiterated. I searched long in my mental attic before I remembered where I had heard the sound before. It is the high thin jangle of Chinese music, overlaid with the pattern of glass wind-chimes, such as Alvah had given me for Christmas.

If frogs an inch long have never been carved in apple-green jade, they should be. Nothing else could repeat the jewel-like perfection of this diminutive species. Their eyes are tiny moonstones. I am sure of this, for I just stepped off the veranda and turned back a spider-lily leaf to look at one and make certain. They are also as soft and smooth as satin. I know this, too, for the variety is the one that clings to the wetness of the shower- bath pipe and drops on my skin.