Smacked by God: A tale of the good Lord’s vengeance

6-28-10

I was sitting on the porch the other day talking to my friend Joanna on the phone.  Ana, Angelita, and Cruz were there also, trying to fashion a dress out of recyclable materials for a competition in Chalate next week.  In the midst of my conversation, my host sister began shrieking wildly and ran into the house, trailing newspapers, cans, and plastic bags despondently behind her.  Then Cruz and Angelita began shrieking wildly also (although they didn’t go to the actual extremes of fleeing), and pointed at the wall above their heads.  On the wall clung a bright green tree frog.  Upon seeing it, I jumped up with a few choice English expletives of my own, although I felt I stayed a lot calmer than I would have five months ago.  Naturally, all the excitement riled the dogs up also, and they barked frantically while Angelita attempted to sweep the clingy little bugger off the wall with a broom.  At one point, it started crawling up towards the roof like it was going to go over the wall into the kitchen, which started us shrieking again – something that I’m sure helped deter its forward motion. 

Angelita finally managed to sweep it off the porch and things calmed down.  Meanwhile, Joanna was still on the phone trying to figure out what the hell was going on.  Was I being robbed?  Was there a stampede of elephants?  Did I find a tarantula on my shoulder?  Joanna is well aware of my disinclinations towards certain members (alright, all members) of the arachnid, reptilian, and amphibious families, so when I finally told her what happened, she laughed so hard she couldn’t talk.  When she finally recovered her powers of speech, she used them to tease me mercilessly about being the biggest wuss ever to walk the earth.  All that ruckus over a little tree frog!  She continued to deride me until we hung up the phone to go to bed.

The next day, I got a phone call from Joanna saying, “Emilie, you’ll never believe what happened to me last night.”  Apparently, after we got off the phone, she went into the living room and saw something green sitting on her hammock.  Upon closer inspection, she found it to be tree frog.

Now, if our roles were reversed, at this point I’d be saying to myself, “Oh crap, God’s about to smack me for making fun of my friend.  Hard.”

However, Joanna is a much more reasonable person than me (or a person with much less forethought, depending on how you look at it).  She calmly took a broom and knocked it out of the hammock.  Upon losing its comfy seat (I’d be pissy if someone knocked me out of my hammock, too), it promptly leapt four feet into the air to land on the front door.  Not deterred, Joanna figured she’d just open the door and sweep it off outside.  But as she reached in to open the door, the intrepid frog took one more leap…

…and landed right onto Joanna’s face.  It slid off and made a scramble for the door, which was fine with Joanna, because now she had a slimy face to deal with.  I can actually picture her, waving her arms in the air like a madwoman.  When she told me, I laughed ‘til I was about ready to piss my pants.  My host family thought I’d gone crazy.

I think the moral that we can take from this story is that we shouldn’t make fun of Emilie because she doesn’t like slimy icky things.  Cause if you do, a tree frog WILL jump on your FACE.

Consider yourselves warned.