So.
I run a website about a bog. I have run it, in one form or another, since 2002. For roughly two decades I have written, lovingly, about peat and reeds and the kind of damp green ground that swallows your wellie if you're not minding yourself. And this morning my cat walked into the kitchen and laid a LIVE FROG at my slippers like it was a tribute owed to a small and demanding god.
I want to be clear about the sequence, because the sequence matters.
I was at the table with the tea, half-reading an email from a man in Ontario who has a question about verse order (don't they always), and I heard the cat flap go. The particular clack it makes when she's coming IN with something. There's an out-clack and an in-clack and they are different and after all these years I know them the way a mother knows her child's footstep on the stair. In-clack. Then the little chirrup she does — that muffled, proud, talking-around-a-mouthful noise. And I thought, ah here, what's she got now, hopefully not the postman's glove situation all over again, and I looked down.
Frog.
A whole frog. Alive. Sitting in the cat's mouth with the put-upon expression of a creature that has had a morning it did not order, and then — this is the part — she set it down. Gently. On the lino. Right at my feet. And looked up at me.
Now. I have lived with this cat long enough to know that look. It is not a sorry look. It is not even a "look what I did" look, not really. It's an OFFERING. She had brought me, the man who has dedicated his middle age to a song about a bog, a creature freshly harvested from the bog-adjacent ditch at the bottom of the garden. (We don't have a proper bog, before anyone emails. We have a wet patch the council won't drain and a ditch that thinks it's a river two weeks a year. Close enough for a cat. Close enough, frankly, for me.)
The frog, I'm relieved to report, was grand. Unharmed. Mortified, but unharmed. Cats are funny about frogs — I think the taste puts them off, or the cold of them, so Rattlin' had carried this fella the whole way up the garden purely on principle, like a fisherman who throws the catch back but wanted you to SEE it first. I got the colander over it (don't ask me why the colander, it was the nearest thing and the holes felt sporting) and walked it back down to the ditch and tipped it out and it sat there a second, gathering itself, and then off it went. Off into the green. Back to the bog that isn't quite a bog.
And I stood there in my slippers in the wet grass at half eight in the morning and I thought: come ON.
Of all the cats. Of all the men. The fella who runs the bog shrine gets handed a bog frog by his own cat. If I put that in a film script someone would tell me it was too on the nose.
Here's my honest position, and you can think me soft if you like. I don't believe the cat knows what the website is. Obviously. She cannot read. She has never once shown interest in the song beyond sitting on the keyboard when I'm trying to type up the lyrics and adding her own verse, which is usually "qqqqqqqqqqqqq" and I will admit it scans better than some of the regional variations people send me. She does not know I write about bogs. She is a cat. She wanted a frog, got a frog, and decided I'd want it too, because she loves me in the deranged way that cats love, which is to say by leaving small corpses and the occasional living hostage in my path.
AND YET.
There's a part of me — the part that's been getting daft letters from strangers all over the world for twenty-odd years, the part that's heard a thousand people swear the song knew their granny's name — there's a part of me that wants to believe she gets the joke. That somewhere behind those level green eyes is a cat who looked at the bog at the end of the garden, and looked at the man hunched over the bog website, and thought: I'll complete the bit. I'll bring him the one verse he's missing.
Because if you've sung the song you know the frog isn't even IN it, not in the standard cumulative order. We've the tree, the branch, the nest, the egg, the bird, the feather, the flea. No frog. Lads have argued for years about whether there ought to be — I won't reopen that, you can go read the proper verse order and have the fight yourselves, I'm tired. But there's something gas about the bog providing the missing creature unbidden. Through a cat. At breakfast.
My mate Pádraig says I read too much into that animal. He's not wrong. He says she's a cat doing cat things and I'm a man who's spent so long in the one song that I see it in the wallpaper now. He's REALLY not wrong. But I'd say this back to him: there's a difference between seeing meaning where there's none, and choosing to enjoy a coincidence that's been handed to you on a Tuesday by a small black animal who asked for nothing in return but her usual cut of the ham.
I'm choosing to enjoy it.
There was a frog on my kitchen floor and a bog at the bottom of my garden and a song in my head that's older than I'll ever know, and for one minute all three of them were in the same room. I don't need it to mean anything. It just made me happy, is all. That's allowed. That's allowed at half eight on a wet morning in Clare with the tea going cold and a man in Ontario still waiting on his answer.
He can wait. The frog took priority.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — She's been at the ditch all afternoon, dead still, the customs-official stare on her. I think she's going back for it. If you don't hear from me it's because I'm in the garden with the colander again, and honestly, of all the ways to spend a Tuesday, you could do worse.