What the heck was I looking at, anyway?  The weirdest creature to cross my kitchen floor in a long while was shuffling clumsily across the tiles – some kind of furry bundle that was half-amphibian and half-laundry lint.  I crouched down and discovered a brown tree frog encased within a shroud of debris.  The poor fellow looked like he had gotten in a fight with a squadron of dust bunnies and lost.  Its sticky toes had acquired enough fuzz and hair to create a woolen vest for itself, along with matching legwarmers.  Even an armored pillbug had gotten trapped in the frog’s fluffy coattails and was being dragged along like a child in a sled.
I apologized for the unswept floors as I carried the frog to the sink and rinsed away the accumulated lint.  I suppose I had allowed conditions to become somewhat dingy during my final week at the cabin, but my mind had been increasingly directed towards the summer and my upcoming travels.  Carefully, I set my amphibious visitor outside the front door, knowing that with a few more hours of packing, I’d be ready to follow.
Greetings and welcome to a fifth season of outdoor adventures, chronicled diligently by yours truly – a native of Norwich, transplanted successfully to the West Coast.  The forthcoming chapters will serve as snapshots of America The Beautiful, focusing on the rougher and more precarious edges of our country’s natural splendor.  Every year, I promise my family to be safer during my hikes and explorations, and every year, something gets in the way of that resolution.  Oh… maybe it’s testosterone.  That, or an unhealthy obsession with cliffs and mountaintops.  At any rate, once I get my house in order and evict any last unwanted tenants, my rendezvous with the natural world can begin in earnest.
I never travel for the purpose of watching wild animals; I see enough of them on a daily basis.  In springtime, my house tends to transform into a wildlife refuge, which I usually take as a hint to vacate the premises until autumn.  Scorpions, bats, lizards and mice have all had their chance to prowl the corridors of Northrup Cabin.  The tree frog may have been the first amphibian to visit my kitchen in years, but by June there was enough wriggly food here to feed a whole family of hungry frogs.
 Ants were everywhere.  They were vying for dominance over the cabin, extending their superhighways across previously untrammeled stretches of wall and ceiling.  My bathroom buzzed with the ubiquitous “snap, crackle, pop” of ants chewing their way through foam insulation.  They raced rather than marched through the house, and I could no longer leave unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink without invoking the ravenous hordes.  I even caught them stealing water from a glass of ivy cuttings and had to relocate the receptacle before the workers drained it completely.
As the ants multiplied, so did the house spiders.  They lurked in dark corners along the ant highways like long-legged bandits, stealing workers at their leisure and sucking them dry.  There can’t have been much nutritional content in a single ant, but these spiders were choosing quantity over quality and prospering.  Perhaps that’s why my house was also attracting tree frogs. 
Every spring there comes a day when I surrender my home to the animals and declare a truce until autumn, when I rev up the vacuum cleaner and reclaim the cabin with a vengeance.  But this week, the ants were actually eating the scum around the bathroom faucets, chewing up the mineral deposits and leaving behind a cleaner surface.  As I locked the front door and headed for the airport, I thought, maybe I would end up with a clean house and a bunch of fat frogs sitting on my bed when I returned in September.  Why shouldn’t the food chain ever work to my benefit?