Creative Bloom | Volume 5: Stories from Artists

✨ Introducing Creative Bloom—our new series celebrating emerging artists where creativity and soulful expression come together. 🌱 Each week, we’ll shine a light on a talented artist and their inspiring work!

Toad and Toadstools

By Laura Campbell

He sits on the remnant of a tree, looking stoic and wise, as the early rising sun gleams in the russet gold of his eyes. Small yet sturdy, tiny and tough, this little toad sits admirably on his toadstool covered stump. Warty and witty, this toad appears a bit gritty, but beneath the muddish brown bumps freckles dots of copper and silken blue green skin. The freckles of green sapphires make the toad seem magical, ethereal in some other regards. The mud and mirth conceal the toad’s true form, and only in the breaking of dawn does the glamour fade.

Yet, it’s just a toad. Just another brown and bloated croaker, sitting like a lump on the stump like any other toad and toadstools.

…

However…

The toad’s bronze eyes have a flicker of mischief about them. Something about that look seems familiar, something that I swear I have felt before when I was a child.

A hidden secrecy of mirth and mystery are in the way the toad tilts his head to the side, watching me with his long mouth quirking up ever so slightly, then giving an impish grin.

Cheeky.

The toad blinks slowly, the thin fold of skin folding over the eyes, like a thinning veil. Standing a little taller on the toadstool crowned stump, the toad now in full rapture presents his nobility in now greater authority. How very handsome and regal the toad now appears. The sun glimmering over his bumpy skin, no longer brown and grey, but now glistening in a blueish green, like polished moss agate.

The toad could easily be written into a fairy tale. The kind of fairy tales with will-o-the-wisps, sprites and pixies with gossamer wings, hidden between the misty veil of the giant and ancient trees, with forests so alive that the very magic can be seen floating through the air with dust and other firebugs, and not matter time of day it is always twilight. It is the realm in which all childhood fantasy and magical wonder blossom from. They are tales with fairy princesses, knightly heroes, ferocious fire breathing dragons, magic doors, and hidden towers. Classic tales of giants, flying ships, magic beans, golden eggs and sleeping beauties. Stories of love and wonder tethered to the souls of innocent youth, when all that existed was magic.     

Magic is the ether of our childhood. This quirky, cheeky toad makes me think back to my own youth. Spending hours in the summers wading through creeks, with holes in my rubber boots but without care in the world as I search, with a fraying toy net, crayfish, minnows, and moths in the woods that fairy tales built. On the rare occasion, I would find golden peepers. Tiny pond frogs, not much bigger than your thumbnail, glittering like gold under the sunlight like its very name. Those tiny golden frogs are well to do with fairy tales, for they are the type to kiss fairy princesses and turn into princes.

So, what’s with the toad?

From my knowledge, according to historical myth, toads were deemed as cunning, bedding with trickery since commonly being associated with witches and the craft. You were supposed to kiss the frog not the toad. Princes didn’t get turned into toads; they were turned into frogs, especially the golden ones. Whereas toads were the slimy icks you'd want to twack off your boot with a stick.

However, as I look at the bumpy toad, skin scaling in embers of sliver sapphire and green, I remember the tiny golden frogs I would see as a child. A child, with holes in her rubber boots trudging through the creek and forest, mud splattered up to her knees while she pretended to catch fairies, while battling waspy dragons, and hiking onwards to the tower of the princess and heroic knight.

As an adult I hike through the forest still, but maybe not with so much creative gusto and imagination. I don’t really steer off the trail, and I always make sure my boots are secure (no holes). I don’t trudge (intentionally) through mud with hopes of finding a dragon or to stumble upon the princess’s tower. I’ve grown, I’ve gotten older, and with adulthood so does the eldering of magic, and the less the dream to chase those magical realms. Now we count steps and track heart rates and monitor our cortisol. Maybe toads are like the tales, with age and time they grow older and gritty, yet in that tough resolve wisdom and experience. Perhaps it is our memories that are true fairy tales.

Although I caught a toad, not a dragon, I still see the magic. Whenever the wind blows just right, and the pollen in that right time of season billows through the trees just perfectly, I will remember them like fairies dancing in the wind. I will stop and admire, remembering my childhood adventures trudging through creeks and forests, hunting frog cursed princes’ and fairy hidden towers.  Just because we are older and wiser doesn’t mean that we are forgotten. Those realms in between still exist, we just need to stop and remember how to look.

So that’s what it is with the toad. Now sitting proudly as he transfers this pot of knowledge to me, gleaming now like a silver king in the sunlight. As I sit in the mulch, surrendering to this newfound wisdom, watching the toad and toadstools as the kingly toad watches me, I swear I see the toad wink up at me.

Cheeky little croaker, I think as I scoop the warty yet handsome thump into my palm to bring home to show to my family, and to tell them the tale of the Kind and the Toad.

Then with my own little wink I say to the toad, “There will be no kissing today.”

On my way back home, the crisp spicy scent of the air along with the sound of fallen leaves crunching beneath my boots gives me a knowing shiver. It’s the sense you feel before you can see. The toad sitting peacefully in my palm gives a chirp causing me to stop and still. The air around me seems to buzz with anticipation, and training my ears trained to the distance; I can hear them. The high piercing chirping of golden frog peepers.

The toad I hold chirps lower in my palm, and I smile down at him, “Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten you.”

However, it’s not the toad really, I am speaking to, but the magic of my childhood. It still exists, just as the pollen and fairies continue to dance among the breeze.

It wasn’t just a toad, just like it wasn’t just a fantasy, it was and is a pigment of our reality that made us into the dreamers and believers of today. Sometimes we just need a toad and toadstools to remind us of that.