Our pet gray treefrog is chirping a lot today — it’s a happy, shrill song, and it makes me think of Henry. It’s because of Henry we have pet frogs. It’s because of Henry we’ve got a beautiful terrarium home for them — complete with live plants, a waterfall, and all the neat rocks Henry collects when we go to Lake Erie. Henry set everything in motion, when he was little, until it was simply inevitable we’d own frogs.

Henry’s taught me everything I know about frogs.

This thing, this little frog obsession, is one of those surprise gifts of parenting nobody tells you about. Nobody could have predicted Henry and I would stumble upon the amazing Stokes Guide to Amphibians and Reptiles. Who could have known we’d both read it, cover to cover, a bunch of times? Who would have figured we’d be able to identify tadpoles in the local ponds, based on size, coloration, and time of year? Henry and I have seen, or caught, every frog and toad and tadpole native to northern Ohio.

I remember the hot July nights we’d drive home from Gram and Boppa’s house on those quiet back roads that cut across farmland — I’d stop the car, pick up toads and frogs, and move them off the road. I remember once driving past a marshy drainage ditch thick with spring peepers. Their collective calls were deafening. We stopped on the side of the road, and Henry quickly caught his first peeper. I’d never seen one — it was so tiny! Then it got loose in the minivan, and we all crawled under seats, using my cell phone as a flashlight, till we’d found it and let it go.

I remember picking blueberries one afternoon — Henry found a baby wood frog, its little black-and-white mask already perfect and surprising. I remember a hike along the stream beyond the ridge at Gram and Boppa’s, where Henry caught a leopard frog. I took a picture of that frog in Henry’s hand with my cell phone, and then Henry lowered him into the stream. We watched him swim away fast.

I remember one humid summer night — it had just thunderstormed, and the girls were sleeping — Henry and I set out for one of the ponds in the neighborhood, flashlight beams bouncing ahead of us. We sat on the flat rocks next to the drainage sewer and just watched. And listened. We saw gray treefrogs, American toads, spring peepers. It was one of those significant nights. Our eyes would meet — we understood, without saying anything, how lucky we were, how few people have ever sat at a pond on a summer night and soaked it all in. We hardly talked.

On the way back home, I threw my arm around him, and I said, this is it, Bunny. It doesn’t get better than this.