I’ve lived in New England nearly all my life, always in small or midsized towns. In my teens, my family lived in a house that was in earshot of the railroad trains that chugged back and forth from here to somewhere else and back again.

There was a marshy area alongside the tracks in one location, near enough for us to hear the spring peepers calling for mates. It wasn’t until my husband, son and I moved to a house on the White River of Vermont that I was introduced to singing toads.

It’s hard to describe either sound with words but here goes. The call of peepers (Pseudocris crucifer) fluctuates, setting off a vibration in the air that I’ve always imagined was like the just-plucked string of a violin or cello.

By contrast, the trill of the American toad (Anaxyrus americanus) is steady, not fluctuating, but starting and stopping in approximately 15 second intervals. Now, one toad is not a whole bunch of noise but dozens of them definitely fill the night air.

And they are singing now, males calling for females so they can make a new generation of little ones that we will find hopping in our yard and in our woods in July.

As soon as I hear them, I reach for a slender book of poetry called Near the Mountains by Joseph Bruchac, a member of the Nulhegan Abenaki tribe from this region of Vermont and New York. He is also the author of Code Talker, a book honoring the work of the Navajo tribe with the Marines during World War II. Their language was used as code, a code that the Nazis could not break.

I have loved this poem since I first read it. Birdfoot’s Grampa encapsulates how I feel about nature, how I wish all of us felt about nature.

Enjoy.