Message in a Bottle

A barely-trafficked residential road in Santa Barbara, California, holds one of the city’s most delightful secrets. Tucked along the swoop of a skinny street, you’ll find a sweet stone wall with hundreds of frogs on it. 

Local lore has it that, in the 1970s, a new family moved in and put a large brass frog statue in the shrine nook previous residents had left empty. When the frog went missing and the residents put out a call for its return, they unleashed an influx of frogs that has been continuing ever since. 

Michael took me to the frog wall on my first visit to California, when we were dating long distance and wrapping our heads around what it would mean for me to give up my life in Brooklyn to join him by the Pacific Ocean. After moving, the urban hike that includes the frog wall became a favorite of mine, one I have enjoyed with many friends and visiting family. 

I went there one afternoon as an after-Kindergarten adventure with my beloved babysitting charge, who I told only that there was a surprise waiting for us, and he had to find it. Freshly energized by a snack and the potential for adventure, he gasped at every step: a rock, a red door, a flower, a tree: “Wow! Is this the surprise?!”

When he spotted the first tiny plastic frog, no bigger than a penny, wedged into the wall, he shrieked, and then he saw more, and more, and more, running ahead in astonishment. It was profound to see this special thing through his eyes and to see just how much of the normal beauty surrounding it might have been worthy of jubilation, too. 

On our last Saturday in California, Michael and I woke up before our alarm. We pattered though little castles of moving boxes to be loaded that day and drove downtown. There, we wound our way up sleepy streets into the hills, parked at an overlook, and wrote a letter to Santa Barbara and Goleta. With gratitude for all that this place had been for us, we rolled it up, tucked it into a ceramic frog container, and walked it down to the wall. There, we found our frog the perfect throne at the heart of the frog shrine and said goodbye to this place.

As we wrote our note, I was reminded of a very different note we left the world once, one I hadn’t thought of since. Michael and I moved to California by way of a three-week road trip across the country. In Arches National Park, we woke up well before dawn and drove to the farthest trailhead. There, we waited until the deep black sky had grayed just enough that we could see our boots on the sand before we started walking. By the time the sun rose, we were miles into a long hike through a staggering landscape.

As the morning heat was just beginning to swell, we cut off the main trail down an optional detour and there, while sitting in the shade of one of the arches, something strange caught Michael’s eye. 

A metal box lay tucked against the inside of the arch. I wondered if it might be a first aid kit, left out here for emergencies. We shuffled carefully down toward it until we could make out a sign on the lid: OPEN ME. 

Inside lay an explanation of a project, some kind of attempt to capture the emotional value of these parks to the public. It came with a plea, that we take a moment to write in one of the notebooks. Michael and I nestled into little nooks apart from each other, the sun rising higher and changing the baffling colors around us from moment to moment, and we wrote. We had been dating long distance for two years, and this was a moment when the joy and the fear came knotting together as we faced an unknown but hopeful path forward. That’s what I remember trying to capture as I wrote: my deep hope for the future, a gentle angst, and the grounding belief in what we had growing between us. 

It’s the same mix of emotions I feel now, as we crack open the swollen doors of the big old farmhouse we’re moving into, as I wake each morning to stronger kicks inside my body and the ever-changing to-do list of building our home. It might be time to write one more message in a bottle, something to paint into the walls or tuck deep into a closet, so that when we look back at how this next chapter unfolds, we’ll remember the profound hope we felt as it all started, when we looked at every tiny delight and turned to each other, asking, “Is this the surprise?!”