The Friendly Frog
How my six year old’s stories reflect everything around me
When Elisa gets fussy about hiking a trail, one of our favorite methods of distraction is storytelling. Somebody starts off telling a story, and then we take turns, picking up where the last one ended. The other day hiking around Futaleufu she weaved a terrific story, with a few queues from her mother, and took creative storytelling to a new level of understanding. So we decided that this is something special I have to document.
“ There was a frog who lived in a pond, he was pink, light green, and light blue in color, and all the other frogs around him were dark green. Everyday, all the frogs sat on lily pads and caught flies with their long tongues. But this rainbow frog didn’t want to eat flies. Instead, he made friends with the flies and built a cage to protect them from the other frogs.
At first, the flies were happy in their new cage. They sat around and chatted with the colorful frog into the night, and finally fell asleep to the frog’s croaking. They all became very close. The frog gave every fly a chair, a portrait that he painted (so they felt at home), and a little blankie for the cold temps. Everybody was merry. After a few months, the flies began to get bored of life in the cage, and needed a way to get out. But they knew if they just left they might be eaten by a frog. So the chemist fly told the assembly that she was going to work on a repellent they could spray on their fly bodies and wings so the frogs wouldn’t eat them. In the first repellent prototype, she used rotten garlic, which was too stinky. She then tried onion, but in the testing phase, the flies, with their many eyes, couldn’t stop crying. Finally, she tried lemon, sour tasting yet sweet smelling, and the testing was a success.
The next day, the flies sprayed themselves with frog-repellent and left the cage. The frog was sad because he realized he didn’t have any other friends. Until one day, in the pond, he met a mami frog and they made a dance and she was pregnant. They eventually got married, but first agreed they wouldn’t eat flies. All the flies came to the wedding and celebrated the frog’s love, and they lived happily every after.”
When she finished that story, she immediately wanted to start a new story. She told another one about a fox who goes to a birthday party, a bear who steals honey from bees, and then realizes they sell the same honey in the supermarket, and something about monkeys…
I’m certain a child draws her ability to invent stories from real experience as much as she does from books. Early on when they start relationships with dolls and stuffed animals, babies invent scenes that include bathing and feeding their toys or pushing them around in the stroller: each an episode from their lives, witnessed dozens of times. As the child grows older she invents new, more complicated stories: like going to the beach, preparing tea-time, and eventually going to school.
Sooner or later, they realize people get married, have kids, live in a house, and by the time they are seven or eight years old, they are playing house, a make-believe game I thoroughly enjoyed. When you’re a child, being an adult sure is easy! You can do the grocery shopping, get married, and drive around in a car all within a few minutes.
These make-believe moments show us how our daily lives stimulate their brains, and should give us pause when considering the actions we would not want our children to emulate. Everything you do becomes routine for your children. This is how life is normalized. Still, I’ve never seen her invent a scene where her stuffed cat Ñau sits down to watch sports on the TV or look at a smartphone.
I’m guessing the storyline of the friendly-frog story is rooted in several recent experiences. The rainbow-themed frog is connected to our campervan. The decision to not eat flies is linked to her status as a vegetarian, a way of life she believes in, in which we don’t have to kill animals to feed ourselves, even if, every time I ask her to eat a vegetable, she turns it away saying “Papi, I’m a fruitatarian. “
And the whole idea of eating flies must have come from the day before while fly fishing and floating the Espolón river with our friend Zach and his dog Shale. She saw me, an absolute beginner, catch just one truchita (little trout), which we quickly put back in the river. It’s a mesmerizing scene for any thoughtful six year old: use a synthetic fly to trick and hook a fish; what follows is an uncomfortable if not traumatic moment where the fish dangles on a fishing line; and then send him back into the chaotic waters with a final, merciful release. I’m certain in her mind, there was an alarm or two. In retrospect, it’s probably better that they see their father hook his rain jacket more often than a fish. While not as glamorous, it is more entertaining.
A river can do wonders to a person, especially in the Patagonia, where rivers are like magic carpets in shades of turquoise that move you through a mountainous rainforest. The water’s transparency allows you to watch as you float over rocks, submerged logs, and a fish or two. Despite the risk of using a clichéd-river metaphor, I will say these stories are like the river, unfolding with time and changing to the rhythm of the mountain. The river is the heart of an unstoppable action, where life thrives on both sides: submerged as above. Most of the time, these stories, like the river, are unheard, unseen, undocumented, and every once in a while we get the opportunity to feel the story’s current and float like a family of characters in a never-ending play of adventure.
