The rainy season in the Philippines is a liquid time and in my fluid
memory I swim to and from school through walls of falling water and
vast brown puddles. It is, as well, the season of toads. The first
torrents of July soften up the summer-parched rice paddies behind our
house releasing from hardened clay burrows legions of bumpy, hopping,
amphibians. In our garden, they would assemble at sundown in stony
silence like so many freshly unearthed terra-cotta warriors.
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