the frogs and the well, a fable aesopian

Vast and wet and fertile was the land where we were young, we laughed and danced with buzzing smiles, like frogs jumping merrily in their marsh. Yet for all the song and dance it only took one summer, one simmering hot summer to make our marsh dry up.

And we grew impatient, as frogs do. This was something new, something we couldn’t talk our way through, knowing nothing of irrigation or shade, we could not make the soil between us fertile again.

So we left to look for another place to live in, left the barren grounds behind us as if they’d never been good to us, left them unfurrowed, unwatered, uncared for.

And then we came here. We found this place and settled, like stupid frogs in a fable seeing a deep well. We told each other all the comforting, hopeful words we could find, that it would all be different now, it had been that horrible marsh all along, and it all just amounted to frogs looking down into a deep well saying to each other, “this looks a swell cool place, let us jump in and settle here”.

In the evening, the shades are long and cool, and somehow we forgot that after night comes morning, and the sun will rise even over a well this deep, only now we have nowhere to jump as the sun dries up this well, like it did the marsh of our youth.

June, 2010