amulets

The Mayans have a serious froggy called Uo. The rain caller. It’s a fat plop of a frog that burrows in mud. (Read about the Uo here)

When I lived in Mexico, we often made our evening paseo near a long-abandoned hotel; during the rainy season the frogs who lived in the drippy jungle and roofless building chorused like something out of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’m not sure if the Uo makes its home on the Pacific coast of Mexico, but every time it was going to rain, the ranas that lived in the overgrown hotel garden sang like the feverish lovers they were.

Here in the drought-dusty Sierra, we have been crying for rain. And the day before the big California-walloper storm hit, I heard a few tree frogs singing. Not many, but their small voices rang out like oracles.

It’s been a long while since I’ve heard froggy voices of any kind. They all but disappeared from Silicon Valley decades ago. The Sierra frogs I heard heralded a good soaking rain, and I made the above picture to honor them as the rain bucketed down last night, and to ease my anxiety about flooding, mudslides, and all the other horror stories from the National Weather Service.

I needn’t have worried about rain. Because right now? It’s snowing.

There’s a big storm expected, but the forest is quiet. At dusk I can hear only the whistling chuckles of quail, the har-de-har of a woodpecker, the hopeful chirping of a few tree frogs. And the rattling of my heart.

I admit, I’m anxious about this storm. My mind invents catastrophes. What if a deluge of rain liquefies the soil and my house slides down the hill? What if gusts of wind blast away the roof? What if trees topple, roads crumble, power goes out? What if, what if, what if?

So I did what I do when I’m anxious: I picked up a pencil and began to draw. It’s the best medicine for me.

Anti-anxiety drawing usually reflects what I’m currently reading, and these days I’ve been reading The Tradition of Household Spirits by Claude Lecouteux. It’s a treatise on European household traditions of appeasing the spirits, or the dead, or dead spirits, or somebody “up-there” so that they’ll protect the home. Most of the traditions seem to protect the home from fire (always a problem in open-hearth houses).

I started thinking about the things that people have traditionally used to protect themselves and their places. So many amulets and charms to help ward off the storms of life!