LESSONS LEARNED FROM TOADS

I've spent a lot of time this summer cleaning a swimming pool. I have learned that toads like swimming pools. Well, they like pools until they don't like them any more; then, I guess, they hate swimming pools. At least, I think the toads would hate the swimming pool...except by then, the toads are dead.

I wonder how many toads drown in swimming pools across the United States every summer. Must be millions.

After I throw the dozen or so dead toads out of the pool filter basket, I try to rescue the live toads still searching for a way out of the pool. I like toads. Toads eat bugs. Toads remind me of happy times in the garden. (I knew it had been a long, lonely week - Steve away at work, the youngest working at 4-H camp - when I found myself talking to the toads I was chasing. Some people talk to their plants; some, to their cats; me...I talk to toads.)

Things I have learned from toads this summer, while cleaning a swimming pool:

Toads are much better swimmers than people.

Sometimes the things we think we absolutely must have - the things we most desperately want - are the very things that will destroy us. I'm pretty sure every one of those toads thought the water looked irresistibly delicious right before he hopped into the pool.

Very good things - like cool, clear water on a hot summer day - can become the very worst things, taken in excess.

Both the shallow end of the pool and the deep end of the pool are deadly - even for an expert swimmer - if you cannot use the ladder and you refuse the help of the big person standing on the deck.

Sometimes fear makes us run away from the thing we need the most. Not ONE of the toads I saved this summer swam toward me - they all swam as fast as they could away.

Blessings are found in unexpected places...like, "Hey, toad, that big scary woman sweeping a pool skimmer toward you really is your new best friend!"

And now, enough about toads. Time to get dinner on the table!