Frogs by Moonlight

A Messy, Muddy Passover Story

Photo by Ed van duijn on Unsplash

I’m a Jew, and the reason I’m a Jew is because of a Passover Seder I completely fucked up in Natchitoches, Louisiana.

It’s a long story, and one I’ll tell in full some other time, but the gist is that I was attending a public boarding school in Natchitoches — they have these boarding schools, mostly in the South, as pre-college training for the last few years of high school for bright students. (At the time it was just for juniors and seniors, but now it’s been expanded to sophomores too.)

At any rate, I guess I was probably a senior by this time, so it’s spring of my last year, I’ve dyed my hair aquamarine because I want to look like a mermaid with seaweed tangled in her hair — I distinctly remember this — but instead of course I look like a little punk who got her hands on some Manic Panic and didn’t have those clear plastic gloves and so dyed her hands aquamarine as well — anyway, so it’s at this time of looking like a complete disaster that I became obsessed with hosting a Passover Seder.

If you’re not familiar with the Seder, it’s a pretty formal and ritualized meal. You gotta have a bunch of very particular stuff for the Seder plate — everything from a sprig of parsley (no problem), symbolizing hope or renewal; to bitter herbs, often horseradish (getting more challenging), symbolizing the bitterness of slavery; to a roasted lamb shank bone, symbolizing the sacrifice of the lamb whose blood was painted on the Israelite’s doorways so that their sons would be spared in the tenth plague.

Photo by Phil Goodwin on Unsplash

I couldn’t find a lamb shank in the grocery. I substituted pork ribs instead. Yeah, I fucked up.

Anyway, the whole thing was like that. 

My Dad was Jewish. He was raised Reform, and then Conservative (which he hated), and then after studying the poetry of Jonathan Swift, who was once the Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, he both became a Swiftian and converted to Christianity. But I was curious about Judaism. Where my Dad found the rituals stultifying and tedious, I found them ancient and intriguing. Maybe because I didn’t know how to perform any of them.

I tried, I really did. The high school was on the campus of Northwestern State University, and we had library privileges. I spent hours thumbing through the “Judaism” section of the card catalog, browsing the shelves, and finally picking out our prayer book for the Seder feast, the Haggadah.

I asked one of our history professors, Dr. Blend, who had been raised Jewish though she was non-practicing now, if she would host us for the night. She said yes, of course she said yes — she was an eternally long-suffering professor with a house located unfortunately close to campus and a tragically charming cat. We, the students, were always knocking on her door, looking for advice, tea, warmth, and kitty time, all of which she somehow provided with grace. Perhaps because she rarely got notice of our visits, she promptly forgot my request, and was unusually flustered when I showed up shortly before sunset one evening, a whole gang of students with me, each of us holding a pot of some ill-conceived dish, to celebrate the Seder with her. She picked up the phone, “Dr. Delery?” He was one of our favorite English professors. “Do you want to come over for a Passover meal?”

I think of that Passover meal every Passover. Over matzoh ball soup made with cornbread-mix matzoh balls — absolutely forbidden for Passover unless maybe you’re Sephardic Jewish, or from the southerm/Spanish areas, which I definitely am not, that side of my family is bog-standard Ukrainian Ashkenazi Jew — as wrong as it was, something happened. OK, maybe it was partly because Dr. Blend opened up a couple bottles of wine and let us have just a taste for each of the four cups of wine you’re supposed to drink. (She and Dr. Delery had all four cups, I noticed.) But it was more than that.  Gathering that improbable group around that improbable table, even the bare bones of that old ritual, that old story, was enough to get us to tell our own stories about slavery and freedom, about being a stranger and welcoming the stranger, about mourning and renewal. It was all so terribly wrong, and all so shatteringly right.

I thought particularly hard about that Passover this year. Passover is a joint meal, a family holiday, but I didn’t have anyone to celebrate it with this year. I could have joined my Havurah’s online Seder but, somehow, didn’t have it in me. I planned to read a Haggadah at home, but then, at the last minute, I got an email saying that I was off the wait list for the Natural History Society of Maryland’s class on amphibious life in vernal pools. 

Yes. That was it. I would look at frogs and salamanders by the light of the full moon for Passover.

I had taken a pre-Passover class with a friend and fellow member of my Havurah, Rachel B. this year. We talked about the choice the women made, on leaving Egypt, to bring not just the unleavened bread — the matzoh — but also timbrels, a musical instrument. Of all things — clothing, more food, jewelry — why would they bring, essentially, tambourines?

Photo by Stéfano Girardelli on Unsplash

To soothe the children, some said. To pass on culture.

The teacher didn’t show up for the vernal pool class — no one knows exactly what happened, crossed wires, an emergency, who knows — but several of the other students were avid naturalists in this area and were able to lead the rest of us down to the pool and explain what we were looking for, and what we were listening to.

Peepers, mainly — tiny frogs with huge voices — and American toads. Some Canada geese. We walked into the edge of the pools and stood there, stock still, looking for the peepers. Others had flashlights, headlights. I had only time to grab my phone before rushing out the door, so I used the flashlight on that. I was wearing sandals that can be taken into the water, and I could feel the mud squelching up between my toes.

The frogs have to come up and sit on something to make their calls, said our new teacher. Knowing that they were right in front of us — that we could actually hear them inches away — and we still couldn’t see them was both frustrating and an odd kind of thrill. Finally, the impromptu leader saw one. I saw a snake swish inches from my leg and toward the light of the flashlight — it was a brown water snake. I still haven’t looked it up. I’m going to assume it wasn’t deadly.

The impromptu teacher gently scooped up the peeper frog, along with a twig and some leaves. Amphibians breath through their skins, she said, so the best way to handle them is to make sure you don’t have anything unnatural on your hands — lotion, chemical cleaners, anything like that. They best way is to get your hands dirty. One of the guys laughed. “I’m always ready then,” he said. “My wife is always fussing at me because my hands are always in the dirt, always dirty.”

We took turns peering at the peeper, who seemed to lean into the hands as if reclining.

And then, when he was ready, he hopped off.

I don’t know why the Israelite women brought timbrels when they left Egypt in a hurry. Soothing children and passing on culture all seem like good guesses to me. But joy too — I think that might have been another reason. Because even in dark times, you need something a little wild, something a little wrong, and something very, very right.