Although we haven’t had any flooding in our area recently, we’ve had enough rain to have water standing in the ditches.
And I’ve noticed that sound the past few evenings…..that sound frogs make…coming from the ditches.
It’s a sound that takes me right back to summertime when I was a child. Oddly enough, I was never afraid of frogs. Spiders…now, that was a different story. But my nieces and nephews and I would catch those tiny little frogs that were found around the foundation of our house. We never kept them or harmed them; we’d “catch and release”.
There was a pond (when there was enough rainfall) beside my childhood home. Judging by the sounds they made, the frogs in there were HUGE. They sang me to sleep “many a night”. Once, when I was in elementary school, my friend, Carol, spent the night. She told me the next morning that she couldn’t sleep because it sounded to her like those frogs were saying “CA-ROL, CA-ROL, CA-ROL“.
The “pond” was to the right of my childhood home
Back to the frogs in the ditches…. I’m wondering: is that just a Southern thing? Do you have frogs in ditches where you live? Does the sound make you think of summer time?
If you’ve wondered how frogs make the sounds they do, here’s a link I discovered while doing a little research for this post. It includes a couple of pretty amazing video clips.
“They’ll cry out like little frogs in a ditch at sundown.”
~Tom Gautreaux
~These Days Of Mine~
these days of mine 
We rarely see frogs here – we’re on a hill with no ditches around but there’s a pond down from our house and we hear bullfrogs all the time in summer – I love that sound too. When I lived in Alabama we were across from a woods with a stream….my brother and I played there a lot…..and the frogs were always on the banks/rocks in the stream. I love the sounds they make – especially on warm summer nights….we’d sometimes sleep on the screened porch and could hear them – it would put me right to sleep!
Pam
Oh we definitely have the frogs and I love that sound. We have a couple of bullfrogs in our lake and they hang out under the docks so when they croak it echoes and is super loud. Enjoy your sounds of summer!
Isn’t that something how just one sound (or fragrance) can transport you through time & seasons? Yes we had frogs but not like that — I’m a prairie girl so there wasn’t an abundance of water; frogs were down by the pond/slough/dugout and noisy down there. Not too many in the barn yard, as the cats would have gotten them! Fun post Dianna 🙂 MJ
Oh, the sounds of summer! They’re the best! We’d were also excited when we could go down to our cow pond and catch tadpoles for school science class. Today, one of my favorite sounds to sleep by continues to be the frog song. Sometimes we’d have cousins visit and comment that it was so loud they couldn’t sleep – we discovered the loud was the frog song. Love your memory jog!
We have the frogs in Michigan.
Yep.. so cool driving through one of those low-lying areas with marshy or swampy spots on the side.. if your window is down, you can hear them good- but only for a second .. gotta’ listen close !
I remember hearing the frogs some in the summertime. A memory making sound for sure.
Dianna, haven’t been on facebook very much lately, but your post today could not have been more perfect for me:) We live beside a creek and there is one spot near less than a mile from our house that the spring peepers are so loud you can hear them even with the car windows up. Today when I was driving home from work, I heard them for the very first time! Do not think I’ve ever heard them in February, but the according to the spring peepers it’s definitely Spring!!
I LOVE the chorus of frogs! I lived in Kentucky for years and the sweet (deafening?) song of frogs in the big pond lulled me to sleep. In Minnesota they sing in mid summer, but I think they’re smaller, shyer types. More reserved like the people here, perhaps 😉
Yep, frogs up here too and in the late spring, we hear them quite loudly – spring peepers. I enjoy their music. 😉