I consider myself very lucky to have a bath on my allotment. It's connected to a central pump which is powered by a lawnmower engine. I've never been brave enough to start it myself, so whenever I hear the pump start to cough into life I run to the tap to take advantage of somebody else's muscle power.
By chance I have planted my pumpkins in the ideal location, in the bed nearest the bath. They're always thirsty, and they enjoy it immensely when the bath overflows.
When I took on the allotment in the spring, the bath was full of fowl smelling green water, so I emptied it and took great pride in scrubbing it clean so it totally changed its colour from yellow to white. However, now in midsummer the water is an opaque brown, covered with leaves and the sad corpses of ladybirds, butterflies and bumblebees.
The pump hadn't been used for a while, so the water level in the bath was getting low. I filled my watering can and observed the unmistakable movement of a live creature in the water. It was both a joyful and perplexing sensation. Was it a fish? or a snake? I filled my can again and this time it was unmistakable - a frog. It couldn't cling to the smooth walls of the bath, so was trapped. I searched for something it could climb on to put in the bath. I found some green plastic mesh, which made an ideal climbing frame for a frog. I watched it climbing slowly and carefully out of the murky water. It rested on the rim of the bath for a while. I could see how beautiful it was. Its skin was shades of green and brown with a kind of white opalescence to them. I could see the white sunlight pulsing on its body where its lungs were overworking with the shock of it all.
I've left the mesh in place so it doesn't happen again.
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