My Mom, the Toad Gorer

My mother has been working in her flowerbeds a lot this week. She's doing a final weeding, planting bulbs, cleaning things out, and just generally getting it ready for winter. Yesterday afternoon she was in her hill flowerbed planting her new tulip bulbs, she was working just as much as she could. Suddenly I heard her shriek. I didn't really pay any attention. My mother startles easily and hates spiders. I figured she just found one of those ubiquitous giant black and yellow garden spiders. I continued with what I was doing. A little while later, she came in the house. I asked her what had startled her so much. She replied that she found another toad. She said this in such a sad, horrified voice that I couldn't help but remember the last time she unexpectedly found a toad. It didn't turn out well for the toad last time. 

This past spring mom was playing in her flower bed and one of the  major chores was putting down mulch. She just uses all the leaves we raked up the previous fall. She was digging away with her garden claw, strewing the leaves here and there. She noticed that her claw didn't seem to be digging very well, there were leaves all clumped up on the tines. So she reached down to clean off the prongs and found a toad. She'd gored it with the claw. She screamed, of course. And she felt horrible because the toad never even saw her coming. It was hibernating in the pile of leaves she was digging through. Poor toad. She loves having toads in her garden because they eat all the nasty bugs; in fact whenever she finds a toad in the yard she carefully catches it and puts it in one of the gardens. And this was a huge toad, it would have eaten a lot of bugs. My sister and I teased her mercilessly for days about that toad. We called her a Toad Gorer and a Toad Spearer. We joked about having toad shiskabobs.

So, when I heard about her encounter with a toad yesterday, I expected to hear another story about a gored toad. Luckily, I didn't. This toad was another huge fella, and he was hibernating about 6 inches under the dirt in mom's hill flower bed. Mom was in there just digging away with her garden claw again, and she flipped him right up out of the dirt. The toad was so startled (and probably only vaguely aware of what was going on) and didn't even try to hop away. Mom felt awful, again, this time for disturbing this innocent hibernating toad. Plus, she didn't know what to do with him. She doesn't know anything about how they hibernate, and she couldn't figure out how that guy was going to breath all winter when he was buried so deep. But, she figured he knew what he was doing when he dug himself into the dirt, so she dug another hole (away from where she was working) and she planted that toad just like she would plant her tulip bulb. Hopefully she'll remember where she planted the toad so she doesn't gore it next spring.