And they were. Peach and papaya marbling into blueberry, and that shade of vermillion lipstick your mother wore in the 70s. It was the kind of sunset that tempts poets to be insufferable, a full-blown celebration unironically staged above a strip mall.

Truth didn’t bother looking. She was busy at the back of her Subaru, scowling at her receipt like it had just suggested she try intermittent fasting for her mood.

“Eight bucks,” she grumbled. “And I didn’t even get the virtuous eggs. I settled for the morally questionable f*ckers because that was all they had.”

Grace kept looking back to the sky, like it might spill a secret if she paid it close enough attention.

“Maybe it’s the universe’s way of saying, ‘Good job not collapsing in public today,’ she said. “Like a gold star for endurance.”

Truth huffed, “Cool. Maybe if I collect five, I can cash them in for one functional nervous system.”

She wedged a bag into the trunk with the low-level rage of someone who’s spent too long on hold with their insurance provider. The breeze carried overtones of pizza and pollen.

J. M. W. Turner (1830), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

“You used to love skies like this,” Grace said gently. “Remember that trip to the Blue Ridge, chasing fall colors? We worked through our midlife crisis on a steady diet of Alanis Morissette and TED Talks about becoming our ‘authentic selves.’”

“That was fifteen years ago,” Truth said, slamming the trunk shut. “Back when I still believed I could make a difference.”

Finally, she glanced up—reluctantly, like she was being dared. “Okay, it’s pretty,” she admitted. “But so is a funeral wreath.”

“I saw an osprey today,” Grace persisted, leaning back against the car. “Just riding the wind like it was having the greatest time. I think I want to be that osprey when I grow up.”

Truth sighed. “The osprey doesn’t get emails that start with ‘just circling back.’ I spent seventy dollars this week for an orthopedist who told me to do some stretches and get back to him if I’m still broken next year.”

“Dang! For that amazing price you got premium indifference,” Grace teased. That’s concierge-level neglect.” Then, exhaling a little too sharply, she snapped. “I swear, if I get one more podcaster telling me I’m not thriving because I didn’t journal hard enough…”

Truth blinked, surprised. “You okay?”

“Fine,” Grace exhaled, smoothing her voice. “Just tired of being blamed for bleeding in a trauma center.”

Truth actually laughed—a quick bleat that almost startled her—as she wrapped her faded denim jacket across her chest. “My kid called today. He and his girlfriend are thinking about moving to Portugal. Affordable healthcare and good pastries.”

“You going with them?” Grace asked.

Truth shook her head. “Nah. Somebody has to stay here to mourn the American Dream.” She paused, then added, “You know, I used to think we’d tear it all down and build something better. Now I just hope the store doesn’t close before I run out of melatonin and milk.”

They stood there, quietly, as the clouds rearranged themselves again—one minute a phoenix, the next a submarine sandwich.

“Sometimes,” Truth said, softer now, “I think beauty’s just nature’s version of gaslighting us. Like, ‘Hey!—look over here while the scaffolding collapses.’”

“Maybe,” Grace said, arms folded. “But I’m still going to look. Not everything has to solve something to matter.”

“Even if it’s just the planet crumbling in a flattering filter?” Truth replied.

Grace grinned. “Especially then. If we’re going down, I’d rather be watching the sky than doomscrolling on the toilet.”

Truth snorted, “Now that’s a bumper sticker!”

They stood a bit longer, two women marinated in pink light. Eventually, Grace nudged her friend with an elbow. “Okay. Let’s get home before the dumpster fire melts the ice cream.”

A bright point was the predictable presence of a bullfrog. Sometimes, she appeared to be watching from across the muck, like a golf spectator. Other times, she splooped into a soggy puddle, vanished for a day or three, then reappeared just like that. On occasion, I heard a voice drifting up through the drain pipes into the house and understood that my husband was having a little chat with his amphibious companion.

Long before this project began, access to the crawl space was deliberately restricted, to keep our cats and other varmints out. We have no idea how our bulgy-eyed friend gained entrée in the first place, but we were proud of ourselves for releasing her from bondage.

Had she made such a house call on the other side of the country from us, or in many other places around the globe, this frog would likely not have been greeted so warmly. And, that is a story that needs telling. I promise to get back to Kermit’s cousin shortly, but it’s important to situate her in the context of a larger environmental picture.

The American bullfrog is considered a highly invasive species in the western United States, Europe, South America and Asia. As with many creatures that now proliferate outside of their native ranges, bullfrogs were introduced to these areas accidentally-on-purpose. Some slipped in with fish stocking operations, some were discharged as a game species. (Frog legs anyone?) Over the years, they’ve been released by the unknowing and escaped from the unsuspecting. Now that they’re free, they’re going bonkers.

A single female bullfrog can lay up to 20,000 eggs at a time. Predators native to the eastern U.S.—large-mouth bass, blue heron, snapping turtles—consume eggs, tadpoles, and adult frogs. Lacking this competition in other places, bullfrogs devastate their newfound habitats. They will eat anything they can fit in their mouths including birds, bats, reptiles, fish, insects, rodents, even each other. Unfortunately, nothing keeps their populations in check. On top of their reproductive vigor and voracious appetites, they carry a fungus to which they are mostly immune but which further decimates other amphibians.

Photo by Thomas Shockey on Pexels

Twenty years ago, in National Geographic, John Roach reported on the unstoppable surge in non-native bullfrogs around the world. More recently, Ted Williams blogged for the Nature Conservancy about the bullfrog plague, as well as ongoing efforts to control them. Neither writer offered evidence of any programs that are really getting a leg up on the frogs. There are just too many of them.

Counting aquatic and terrestrial plants, mammals, arthropods, amphibians and other organisms, the American bullfrog, known scientifically as Lithobates catesbeianus, is one of about 1500 total species categorized as invasive, foreign, non-native, or alien. As I thought about these labels and how many other things are stuck with them, I was struck by how similar they are to terms used to describe humans who move from one place to another. I couldn’t help noticing the combative and nationalistic tone of the words and of those associated with their management. Verbs like “eradicate,” “eliminate,” “kill,” and “euthanize” show up with frequency in articles about forms of life that have moved beyond their original locations.

NOAA defines invasive species as animals or plants from another region of the world that don’t belong in their new environment. But what determines belonging, and who decides what does and does not? Has the line between the new environment and the original one always existed? Do we understand enough about how species migrate, breed, hybridize, and evolve across time to make such determinations? Most importantly, and especially because humans are directly or indirectly to blame for almost every redistribution, is there room for compassion in how we manage them?

Photo by Robert Zunikoff on Unsplash

It didn’t take long to discover others who have taken questions like mine to the next level, identifying biases and inconsistencies within the field of invasion biology and calling to attention the need for a more nuanced lens. Rather than searching for ways to rid our environment of non-native species, Nicholas Reo, who is an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and an Assistant Professor of Environmental and Native American Studies at Dartmouth College, says, “It is our responsibility to figure out how they are useful.”

When I set out to tell the tale of a resident amphibian, it was not my intention to jump into a much broader and more provocative exploration of our anthropocentric tendencies, but if I look at where I’ve landed from the frog’s perspective, it makes perfect sense. Indigenous principles teach us to see ourselves in kinship with all other beings. Frogs are members of our planetary family and, therefore, are deserving of the possibility of shifted thinking.

Our amphibious friend, spring 2018. Isn’t she cute?!

Our green playmate kept us company that whole summer, but once she’d been rehomed we didn’t think much more about her. We certainly never expected that when we opened up the crawl space the following spring we’d find another bullfrog hanging out in the damp darkness, looking ever so familiar.

We’ll never know for sure if it was the same one, but it’s fun to believe she liked us so much that she returned. After all, bullfrogs can travel over a mile in damp environments.

We removed her a second time, all the while speculating about her solitary existence in that dank habitat. We decided she needed a she-shed, a place to get a break from the males whose noisy, nightly advertisement calls we hear undulating from the marshlands that surround us.

It’s been seven years since we first made her acquaintance. We’ve not seen her again. But this winter, when the house was very quiet, we often heard soft, raspy sounds coming from somewhere just below the floor.

I want to tell you that I found the stamps I’ve been missing for a month. I want to tell you that I’m wearing sparkly earrings, the kind I usually save for dressing up. I want to tell you how it feels, when I splash my face in the morning and the water gets noticeably colder right before it starts to get warmer.

I want to tell you how these days, if I ask how you’re doing, I’m going to add “despite everything.” Because whatever it is that’s happening, whatever kind of liquifying, life-changing metamorphosis we are experiencing to be able to emerge into a reimagined understanding of who we are capable of being, it’s really, really painful, and I can’t pretend it’s not.

I want to tell you how fascinated I am that the iris tubers I planted last fall, the ones I ignored, left languishing for months in a basket, on a chair, at a table we never use, survived such a hard winter. And that I did, too, that we did, those of us who did.

I want to tell you how grace manifests when a pileated woodpecker who has been punctuating the clouds with his calls finally makes himself fully visible, flying into view, totem wings spread wide, red crest dancing like a bright poppy in a fallow field.

Pileated woodpecker. Photo by the author

I want to help a tender heart past yesterday’s misery and tomorrow’s grief by telling it the story of how, after having our too-green bananas in a paper bag for two days with no evidence of ripening, I add an apple, and my husband asks if I want them to have a friend to play with.

I hope often. I hope. Often.

I want to tell you how this lover of mine rides a unicycle, because he refuses to grow up or grow out of the pursuit of what makes him joyful. I want to tell you how, when he’s out there on his one wheel, he greets the neighborhood, how he knows their names and pieces of their stories, how he gives a little money to the couple who met while recovering from their addictions, because he knows they’re saving up to move back to the west coast.

I think about how we should give them more, and I wonder how often people with a lot of money do that, just hand over a thousand bucks, or ten, to make someone’s life a little easier.

I want to tell you about the man at the gym, the one who chooses a spot in the room as far away from everyone else as possible, the one who doesn’t chat before class or linger after to find out anything about anything, like most of the rest of us do. I want to tell you how a friend tells me she sees him out in the real world, that she nods and smiles but receives no acknowledgement. I want to say that his apparent disinterest in seeing or being seen changes the way I see him.

I want to say I’m astonished when I make an announcement about donations for a food pantry project and he hands me thirty dollars cash, no questions asked, even though I don’t know who he is, even though all he knows about me is what he gleans, once a week or so, from a 45-minute exercise class.

I want to tell you how a full four months after he trusts me to do what I say I’ll do with his money, I finally introduce myself to him as we walk outside into the intense aliveness of a spring morning, my sweatshirt still damp from being doused with rainwater an hour earlier.

I want to tell you how he shares his name and tells me he comes here from the next town over, how he and his wife used to own a business there, and how his mother’s name was Elizabeth.

When he speaks to me again a week later, tripping gently over my name, and I tell him he can’t forget, because it was his mother’s name, I want to tell you how he smiles. I want to tell you how we both smile.

Photo: Don Shaw

It was a little drab, the kind of place you could drive past without noticing. It was a little timeworn, the kind of place you might drive past on purpose. Unless you knew better. Unless you knew that on the other side of those drab, timeworn, corrugated metal walls you’d find something more nourishing than you ever imagined.

Kepley’s Barbecue. Yes, -cue. If you spell it with a -que somebody is going to shake their head and say “bless your heart,” and not in a good way. Bar-B-Q. BBQ is also acceptable, or just Q if you’re short on time.

Now, if you know anything at all about the South, you know that good barbecue is not just a staple, it’s a religion. And as with every religion, there are different ways of worshiping. Wood-smoked or electric cooker. Pork shoulder or whole hog. Sliced or chopped. Lexington-style or Eastern. Red slaw or white. With or without extra dip, the sauce you dribble on your pork to give it that little extra punch. Everyone has their beliefs about which combinations are right and which establishments offer the most certain path to gustatory heaven.

In 1968, when my father brought our family back to High Point, North Carolina from Kansas, I was six years old. By then, Kepley’s had already been in business for 20 years, and the founder, Hayden Kepley, had passed the baton to a new pair of owners: Charlie Johnson and Bob Burleson. Another 33 years later, Charlie retired, but Bob carried on.

And on, and on.

Bob Burleson in his late 80s. Photo: WGHP TV

Starting out as a curb boy when he was just 16, Bob grew up with the business. Later, his children did the same. His daughter, Susan, who became a co-owner when Charlie left, tagged along with her dad from the time she was three years old. And when he died in 2022 at the age of 90, she kept going. Until now.

Last month, soon after announcing her retirement, Susan opened Kepley’s doors to the adoring public for the last time. For 77 years, the Burleson family devoted itself to making sure people got what they needed from an establishment that ended in the same military-surplus Quonset hut where it began. No renovated interior. No outdoor patio. No snazzy, new location across town. The same green awnings, low ceilings, ordinary Formica booths, cluttered countertops and walls greeted customers across decades. The only things that expanded at Kepley’s were the pig-art and the smiles.

The tea was sweet, the Cheerwine cold, the hush puppies crisp-tender, and the barbecue—Eastern-style with the bright tang of vinegar and the prick of a little pepper—reliably satisfying. It was just right for a midday meal, a tailgate picnic, or a night when the home team needed a break from cooking. We counted on Kepley’s.

Though I left North Carolina 30 years ago, my barbecueship with Kepley’s didn’t end. Most every time I made a visit back home, it would turn up on the menu for a simple supper. And when my parents came to visit us, they’d tuck some in a cooler to share while we were together.

Maybe it was those across-the-miles memories that prompted the notion of a final homage to Kepley’s, though I did not predict where it would end up when it first popped to mind. It started with a relatively easy ask of a brother who still lives in High Point: Would he buy and freeze a quart or two that I could retrieve on some undetermined date in the future?

I knew Kepley’s (“Pigs Can Fly”) offered shipping, a convenience that manifested after Martha Stewart mentioned the restaurant on national television. But we were headed out of town the same week any package was bound to arrive.

Instead, owing to my brother’s generous, ingenious nature, he took that service upon himself. He bought the Q, froze it, and two weeks later, shipped it to us on dry ice, along with a double-order of hush puppies.

My brother, the BBQ guy, and two friends who go way back.

I’ve never in my life been so excited about a UPS parcel! I checked the tracking updates repeatedly as it made its 48-hour journey across three states. Like a scent-trained dog, the closer it got the more agitated I became. When the map told me it was less than two miles away but the estimated arrival increased by three hours, I howled and very nearly set out to find the truck and pluck the package right off the back of it.

Finally the brown step-van appeared. I sprinted to the door and lifted the box into my arms like I was rescuing Moses himself from the River Nile.

“I sure am glad to see you!” I hollered to the driver who was now nearly back to the truck. “Barbecue! It’s barbecue in here!” The guy grinned but gave me a look that said he had nothing left to offer a chatty type like me.

And so it was that on a recent weekend, we had a last supper. I piled the barbecue into a double boiler and popped the puppies in the oven. I made a red cabbage slaw. When the meat was hot and the cornmeal crust golden brown, we scooped generous portions onto our wedding china plates and dug in with our real-deal silver. For an added flourish, we spooned ketchup from a crystal bowl but set the bottle of Tabasco sauce right there next to it.

For nearly eight decades, the Kepley’s crew made good food. But it took more than that to become a local institution. Walking through that door made you feel closer to a way of being that was harder to find beyond those paneled walls. Inside, the arms of community welcomed you, gave you a smile, invited you to sit a spell.

Kepley’s wasn’t exceptional because it offered award-winning fare or entertained occasional visits from celebrities. It was a place where you felt connected, valued, a place where you mattered. It wasn’t that it had no imperfections—most anything that lives into its 70s will have its share of those. Rather it was how everything worthy, and right, and real about the place meant you never really noticed any flaws. And the way I see it, there’s something downright holy about that.

And yet, everything about my inclination to take sides goes against a stronger instinct to look for common ground. When I replace nameless, faceless people with those whose stories I have the privilege to know, or with whom I share the briefest of smiles, everything softens. Hostility loses power. Hope brightens.

This is what I have to come back to. This is what I have to do, again.

Someone bemoans the cost of medication, points to a president, to a pair of presidents. I say I think the price of prescriptions is way bigger than any administration, and the person agrees, backing off their soap box.

Someone expresses concern for the growing strength of other countries and wonders who will prove a better leader if another global war erupts. We talk about motives, ethics, and the danger of trusting social media. We don’t agree with each other, but our conversation is civil.

Someone in class whose name I don’t know hands me cash after I announce a collection for the food pantry. Just like that. Just hands money over to me, no questions asked.

Someone in Walmart, walking the length of the aisle where I’m looking for peanut butter in glass jars, wishes every person well. At the far end, a worker stocking shelves strikes up conversation.

Someone delivers soup. Someone turns off the news. Someone searches for a lost elder who has wandered away from home. Someone works endless hours in a volunteer relief center. Someone makes amends. Someone stops to listen. Really listen. Someone hears. Someone goes on singing.

I struggle to put my faith in systems that have consistently elevated power and greed at the expense of everything else. But I trust the feeling that emerges when I stop fretting for enough minutes in a row to attend to my heart. Somehow, it says, we will find our way. Our children and their children will find their way. Somehow it will have to be enough to go on caring for each other, carrying each other, through it all.

This is what we do now. And when we can, we do more.