An unseasonably warm fall day’s light spills across the valley, warm as honey on the tongue.
The trees wear their autumn finery: yellows bright as finch feathers, reds deep as heart’s blood, golds that rival the sun itself. Each tree burns like a torch before November’s gray descent. This fleeting beauty will vanish soon enough, which makes these days all the sweeter.
As winter approaches, cold lives in my bones. These wasted muscles, once warm with their own fire, have grown quiet. My body forgets how to heat itself, blood moving slowly through thinning veins. But today—today the sun pours gold through the trees, and I cannot resist its call.
I wheel onto the patio, tilting my chair back to catch every drop of light. Warmth pools on my belly and laboring chest, bringing relief. My perpetually cold hands and feet begin to thaw. It’s a beautiful, blue-sky day. I glance around in quiet satisfaction—and then I see it: the black railing beside me holds what looks like a river stone my son might have balanced there—gray-green, perfectly still.
But stones don’t breathe.
This one does, its pale throat pulsing with life.
A gray treefrog.
No bigger than my thumb, it clings to the warm metal with delicate toe pads, each one a miracle of adhesion. Its skin shifts between bark gray and leaf green, a living watercolor that bleeds and blends with its surroundings. Golden eyes, flecked with bronze, regard me without fear, then close again. It too seeks the same late-season warmth that lured me outside.
These tiny creatures live in constant transformation. Spring finds them as tadpoles in woodland pools, tails swishing through tea-colored water. By summer, they climb high into the canopy, feasting on insects and filling warm nights with soft, rhythmic trills. Now, as autumn deepens, they descend from their leafy towers to seek winter shelter.
This one pauses in its journey, stealing an hour of sun on the patio railing.
Soon it will tuck itself beneath bark or stone—perhaps beneath these very patio stones—safe from hungry possums and raccoons. Then begins the miracle: its body will brew glycerol, nature’s antifreeze. Unlike other hibernators who fight the cold, treefrogs embrace it. They freeze solid. Heart stills. Blood crystallizes. They become ice sculptures of themselves, suspended in perfect patience until spring’s resurrection.
But we share this gift of afternoon light, the treefrog and I. A breeze carries the sweet decay of leaves returning to soil. A cardinal calls from the dogwood. Time pools around us, unhurried as the stream below.
What strange companions we make—one heading toward ice, the other toward ash. Yet here, in this moment suspended between seasons, between strength and weakness, between sleep and waking, we are simply two creatures sharing warmth. The sun doesn’t ask about our destinations. It simply gives.
The treefrog shifts slightly, angling toward the light.
I do the same.
Soon enough, shadows will stretch long across the valley. The treefrog will continue its journey to winter’s crystalline sleep. I’ll retreat inside, to the oxygen machine’s steady rhythm, to the narrowing circle of what remains possible. Our paths will diverge, like streamwater flowing around a stone.
But not now.
Not yet.
For now, there is only this: warm light painting the world gold. A small throat pulsing with quiet life. The sweetness of borrowed time.
In this radiant moment, illness becomes another word for transformation. Winter is only summer sleeping. And two unlikely creatures—soft-bodied, temporary, perfect—bask together in the last warm light of the year, bearing witness to the beautiful, terrible truth that all gifts are borrowed, and therefore precious beyond measure.
The treefrog blinks its golden eye.
I blink back.
The universe holds us both.