There's not a lot to said about this piece other than the fact that it originated as a slowly-growing series of 'jot-'em-down' fragments scribbled onto the scratchpads. Some of these fragments had mould or mildew-like growth that slowly crept outwards and eventually began to amorphously glom themselves together into an accretion that vaguely resembles a free-verse, or perhaps as a different-form representation of they way your young self felt such a weird fascination on the first spring morning walk along the edge of the pond... That way you were both intrigued and repulsed in near equal measure at the physical reality of frog-spawn, and the accompanying explanation of just what it was... How the sickening realisation that not only were eggs not just for breakfast anymore, in fact, they could come in a form that looked like something produced by an alien in a 1950s sci fi film...

This piece also receives inspiration from one of those situations where, as a young kid just learning how to read, sometimes you can make what are (often in retrospect) hilarious mistakes that all-too-often take a rather embarrassingly long time to get corrected. Indeed, sometimes if egregious enough, such errors and malapropisms can lead to things such as insulting nicknames that can stick like superglue to someone for the rest of their life.

Some of them, thankfully, are in retrospect, far too trivial and innocuous to be anything other cutely funny after the passage of enough years. In my own case, the inspiration that partially sparked this piece was a vague memory of being read some bedtime book as a little kid about a prim and proper cartoon froggy couple in a prim and proper cartoon froggy marriage and doing the prim and proper things a prim and proper cartoon froggy newlywed couple should be doing. (like what they called "whoopee" on the Newlywed Game - you never fooled anyone, Mr. Eubanks.)

So, it was maybe a year or so after being read that fine story, and I was a bit bigger, and maybe a bit smarter, and one spring, I got the full spectacle and explanation of frogs and toads in piggyback formation producing mounds or strings of bizarre, black-speckled alien nose-blowing that somehow became tadpoles that the ones that survived being eaten by all their brothers and sisters eventually became little froglets...

The female protagonist of that bedtime book I not too long ago spoke about just so happened to have a name that I misread (and misinterpreted) as "GreeTide" for at least a couple years before finally realising that Ms. Froggy's actual name was Gertrude.

Because, for just a moment there, that younger version of myself poked through and wondered if Gree-Tide perhaps had some far more prim and proper way to produce tadpole children of her own that perhaps didn't look so... Slimy.

Still, hearing those Spring Peppers in the early spring around that vernal pond, I could swear that it sounded like all the males were dewlap-swollen calling for "Greeeeeeee-Tide... Greeeeee-Tide..."