Daily Editor Sam Losee has left her house way too few times since moving back home in March. Since then her social skills have vanished, her brain has rotted, and her relationship with the neighborhood creatures has strengthened beyond belief.

After a month or so of spending my every waking hour looking at a screen, classes finally came to an end, but that didn’t stopped new challenges from appearing in their place. Since I could no longer milk talking about taking classes with my twitter-famous poetry professors or complaining about taking my language requirement classes (requirement finished, baby!) I needed to find a new personality trait to lean into. Some of you may have seen this one coming. You may have seen the deranged post I wrote last semester about a certain bodega cat. You also may have experienced the result of my being told my spirit animal was a frog and deciding that I could not rest until frogs had become my Brand. In any case, my new thing is basically embodying Snow White, and by that I mean my behavior has gotten so primal that the local fauna think I am one of them and have decided to convene with me from inside and outside of my home. Also, we have similar haircuts. Being that I live in the woods in the middle of nowhere and I have been fond of animals my whole life, really sending it with my animal relationships seemed to be the way to go. Now, after getting to know them for a little while, I am going to cyberbully the hell out of these animals where they’ll never see it because I hate confrontation! Here’s a ranking from worst to best of everyone I’ve met recently, and an apology to a certain individual:

10. Turkey Vulture

It was a lovely, sunny day, the first truly springlike one of the whole season, and I was so excited that it wasn’t cold and disgusting that I made my sister help me drag the porch couch to the middle of the lawn so I could study comfortably in the sun. It was time to do my CC essay, which was over a week and a half late, but besides the Communist Manifesto, I hadn’t read any of the books in full (or in part, let’s be real) so I had no idea how the hell I would compare and contrast three of them. I sipped my ice coffee while I scrolled through endless pages of Hannah Arendt. I knew what she was talking about…..maybe? My ice coffee was finished too soon. A bug crawled across my leg. I contemplated the highly atomized society and its competitive structure and concomitant loneliness. I looked for a song I had wanted to listen to on Spotify, and suddenly, forty-five minutes had passed. I hadn’t even listened to the song yet. Now I don’t even remember what the song was. Not even an atom of mine wanted to keep reading Hannah Arendt, however many points she was making. My eyes were so dry from looking at the screen they felt like they were going to fall out onto my keyboard. And then I noticed him circling above, greasy and smug-beaked. A solitary turkey vulture just waiting for my life force to finish draining. For those eyeballs to fall right on out.

9. Fox

Ok, so I didn’t actually see this one, but I just really love foxes a lot and my dad told me it was such a lovely red one, so I wanted to include it. Also, it lives under our decommissioned chicken coop, so we’ve almost met plenty of times. Someday, I hope to witness its sleek body and sweet face on its way to devour something small in the woods. We don’t have chickens anymore for obvious predator reasons, but if it ate one of my birds I wouldn’t even be mad. Honestly, this same one probably has. Anyway, this fox gets this rank for alleged prettiness.

8. Assorted Lawn Songbirds

There’s way too many of these folks to name, but they are extremely chirpy and lowkey really annoying. That being said, I think songbirds have the most cutest and hilarious animal shape of all time besides maybe the seal’s, and although I usually just listen to them, a visit from a particularly fat one is always a treat. Five or six days after the vulture incident, I was sitting in the lawn once again, taking my foreign language final and realizing if I had absorbed all of the knowledge I had ever read in the textbook I would kind of know how to say stuff. If only. Anyways, I was blasting “Super Trouper” by ABBA from my computer speakers and I think all of us were really vibing with it. That’s a win in my book.

7. Green Frog

This frog is my unproblematic king. Green frogs are not very large, but probably large enough to wreak havoc on the goldfish it shares its teeny pond with, and yet, this frog has only been seen chilling among the stinky pond plants. He has a very shiny, slimy head, and he lets you get very close to him with no hint of fear. He’s not really a talker but you can tell this guy has seen some shit. Every day it is a battle to restrain myself from posting about him on my finsta, but in the meantime, I stare into his little froggy eyes and hope we’ll be better at telepathy soon.

6. Distant Fat Bird

I saw this bird at dinner last night while eating fries and talking about how a bunch of people I went to high school with are pregnant now. Queens! The idea of me, functioning at 4% capacity, having a kid right now literally horrified me, but even more horrifying was the idea that these people who I’d known since I was as young as four had also perceived and known me for that long. As I was starting to silently spiral, my sister noticed that there was a bird behind me outside the kitchen window and asked us what we thought it was. It looked dove-shaped and was orangey in the light of the setting sun, but it flew away before we could identify it. “I was hoping it might be a bluebird,” my sister said. “It was definitely not a bluebird,” I replied. Well, it wasn’t, but it was extremely cute.

5. Red Panda

My dad does this thing where he just decides what things or people are called based on anything he mishears about them, what they sort of slightly remind him of, or just whatever he wants. When something has been named, there is no ceremony or even acknowledgment it has recently been named (or renamed if it had a name previous to encountering my dad). Most importantly, under no circumstances can it be renamed post-Dad Name. In this case, one day I was simply asked, “Did you see the Red Panda?” like I, a trained zookeeper who had worked with literal red pandas, would believe we had one living on our property. It was explained to me that the particularly large groundhog that runs around a bend in our driveway was now named the Red Panda because in certain lighting it looked sort of like one. The Red Panda was a reoccurring visitor for a year or two, but I hadn’t yet seen it in 2020, so I thought something must have happened to it. But on the same day that ugly vulture decided to be an asshole, I saw the Red Panda scurry across the driveway from one patch of cedars to another. Its little legs carried its thick, furry body swiftly and guinea pig-like around its territory, if that’s a thing groundhogs have. I really wanted to pick it up more than anything and hold it tight while we listen to something cathartic that it won’t understand.

4. Various Snakes

As the Bwog slack knows, I’ve had my fair share of snakes recently. It started with the eastern milk snake we found hanging out in my basement like it had only gotten home from high school like half an hour ago and just wanted to relax, man! Needless to say, we expelled him gently from the area, but since then I have seen many a garter snake and De Kay’s snake soaking up the warmth in our greenhouse. My favorite snake moment was when I saw four garter snakes in a pile around the wall of stone insulation separated from the rest of the greenhouse by a wire fence. We were listening to the new Thundercat album together while I transplanted my little sprouts and they wound around each other in little snakey knots. The De Kay’s snake by my foot vibed to the bass and trusted me not to step on her. I didn’t. There was a sense of harmonious content among the many flats of perennials and the whir of the back fans, snake, and human alike. The garter snakes flicked their tongues to the beat and helped me pick out which color popsicle stick to mark my finished flats with. It was such a beautiful day for newfound friendships.

3. Totoro

Totoro is a little angry man that I like to bully a lot, but for all the in-person bullying I inflict upon him I felt it was only fair to admit (where he won’t see it) that I like him very much. Totoro is my sister’s six-year-old chinchilla. He is much smaller than he is supposed to be and this angers him beyond belief. Every time I pass him he looks absolutely furious. He has things he enjoys, like running on his wheel at night, screaming, and eating raisins, but even then he remains enraged. I bully him because he is so sour and he despises me, but deep down I love him very much, for he is the most adorable, soft boy I have ever met. I show him off on Zoom whenever possible and the kids I supervise for my internship have been incorporating his “chinchilla screams” into their writing. When I watch him sleeping in his little house I feel an overwhelming urge to protect him at all costs and I wish I could make him happy with his size. I’m still going to say mean things to him when I see him though.

2. Neighbor Goats

I think I’ve seen these neighbors exactly once since they moved in on top of the wooded hill with us, but that hasn’t stopped their goats and me from making friends through the lower fence. The fence runs alongside my road and the goats are almost always out when I pass by, frolicking among the sheep and chickens scattered across the hill. When you go up to the fence, they come to greet you earnestly, and they stay even after it is revealed that you don’t have anything for them to eat. They vary in size and color as goats do but they are all very sweet and are down to clown for as long as you’d like. I did see one of them swallow a large chicken feather whole which was really disgusting and confusing but besides that I have no complaints. Actually, I think I’ll go give their heads a scratch after this.

1. Massive Fucking Bullfrog

Let’s harken back to the green frog. This little guy and his weeds are in a separate bucket attached to this extremely tiny pond, which is actually an old bathtub with a filter setup and lots of algae and other scum. The bathtub had been the home of many generations of goldfish from an original batch from PetSmart called The Scientists (yup, this is a Dad Name). Once in a while, we would add a goldfish or two, but the ponds mini-ecosystem pretty much thrived on its own. There was always a frog-in-residence, usually pretty small and always non-threatening. That is, until this bullfrog. Sorry, this Massive Fucking Bullfrog.

When I say massive, he probably isn’t much bigger than your standard bullfrog, but with legs extended and arms up, he is so much longer than you would think that it’s kind of freaky. He liked to sit with the green frog or in the main tub and croak loudly to us through the kitchen window. Was he the cutest frog ever? No. He was more like a grizzled cowboy kinda frog, but that has its own pull to it, you know? My parents were suspicious of his motives, for he was certainly large enough to swallow any of the fish, if he wanted. But as far as I was concerned, if he was going to do it, he would have done it already. He had moved in roughly the same time I had in March, and the two of us seemed to be getting used to the new old environment at the same speed. Sometimes I would take my coffee and go sit on the patio with him and chat. He didn’t mince words, and he was a great listener.

Then one day as I came into the kitchen for lunch, my dad said solemnly, “Froggy ate the Scientists.” I was shocked. “WHAT?” He nodded with utter conviction, but I didn’t believe him. I wanted to believe the frog I had come to know was the one still out there, stomach empty of fish and heart brimming with empathy. But when I checked the pond, the goldfish were indeed missing. I told my father that it could just as easily have been a bird, since it has happened before, but to him, the frog had a guilty look in his eyes, and so it was decided he would be taken to Froggy Exile.

You may recall mention of Froggy Exile from this Bwog In Bed the morning after it occurred. To summarize, my dad caught the Froggy Convict in a large butterfly net and deposited him somewhere far away from the fish pond. From all of the anti-Froggy propaganda that was going around in the house, I was starting to believe this frog was indeed the culprit. I waved goodbye to him as my dad drove away, shedding a single tear that this amphibian would no longer be a part of my life. Over the next few days, I talked to green frog, who did not seem particularly sad. I guess they weren’t friends. My parents had already moved on, having gone back to the pet store and purchased a new set of goldfish. They had not yet been named, but we were toying with the idea of naming them Rico Nasty and Doja Cat. Life at the Losee household was peaceful. Until the next morning.

“Hey, uh. Froggy was framed.” My dad said. “Someone did this…we saw some of the Scientists in there this morning.” I was in shock. My froggy pal was innocent after all? He had been cruelly snatched from his home and taken somewhere distant for nothing? And I had believed it was justified? I couldn’t handle this. I was ready to snap. I ran outside and collapsed next to the pond, my world shattered, my journalistic integrity ruined. There was no way for me to find him. He was certainly gone forever. Was he in a better place? Who could say. But he had been a good froggy all along, and I had a part to play in his wrongful exile. It is now that I would like to redeem him in the eyes of the Bwog readership, to make up for my wrongs and assure the masses that this man is a good one. This frog is my friend. Froggy, if you’re out there, I love you. I hope you can forgive me for what I’ve done.

Snake paparazzi via me