Now that the insects have returned, the dinner table is set.
At the valley’s edge, where the stream threads clear over stone, the sun melts behind the hills, and I listen to one of the season’s first frog choruses—leopard and bullfrog voices rising. Their occasional “gulps!” still feel new, punctuating the air like fresh commas in the valley’s unfolding story. Soon, in summer’s thick heat, their calls will be the valley’s constant drum, but tonight, they are a novelty, a chorus waking from winter’s quiet.
Frogs are built to see. Bulging eyes, set high, grant them a near-circle of vision. They perceive colors beyond our imagining—ultraviolet hues invisible to us. Motionless, betraying nothing, they watch a blue heron stalk from the shadows, even as they track the iridescent shimmer of a fly, wings hovering inches away. Then, a tongue flicks—faster than our slow eyes can follow—snatching prey from the air. Their damp skin still hidden, still safe beneath grass and water-slick stones.
From the eaves above the patio where my wheelchair rests, I hear the first chirps and scratches—a bat colony stirring to life.
With clockwork precision, the chimney’s edge comes alive each night, minutes after my phone declares sunset. First one, then a rush—bats pour into the dimming air, as birds cede the sky. Wings unfurl, leathery sails catching the last copper light. Thirty, forty, fifty—I count as they stream past, dark arrows against the deepening blue.
They flutter. They swoop. Dive. Feast on insects I barely glimpse in the growing darkness.
Where the frogs and I perceive shadow, form, and color, the bats’ world is composed of sound made tangible. These are auditory hunters. Where I see only vague shapes, they hear position, texture, density, distance—reality rendered in echoes of their high-pitched calls bouncing off wing, wood, and water.
In this shared twilight, our perceptions brush against each other, realities overlapping only at the edges—like ships passing in darkness, lights briefly glimpsed across a vast, unknowable sea.
Night deepens. Frogs add their voices to the cricket chorus. Bats vanish into forest treetops, leaving only the whisper of wings and questions suspended in the star-pricked dark.
How many worlds exist in this single valley? How many realities unfold here, invisible to eyes not shaped to see them, silent to ears not tuned to hear them—whole universes brushing past us, close enough to touch, yet far away as the stars?