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      It was last Wednesday when the man upstairs emailed me the article from Nature magazine, the one about Bucky the frog, whose body was still stored in the freezer. The family was waiting until they were all together again to bury him; Bucky deserved that. But there was never a right time, so he stayed stiff on a freezer shelf for six years behind a bag of green beans. If you haven’t read it, the article is about the pets we choose—dogs, cats, gerbils—and the pets that choose us, finding us by chance, delivering secret life messages across species-lines.

      Bucky’s term as family pet began when the youngest son captured a tadpole—Bucky—in a jar while on vacation in Florida. They assumed he’d let it go once the holiday ended, so were surprised when he removed the jar of murky water from his suitcase after baggage claim. The boy fawned over Bucky as he developed, eventually graduating him to an oversized aquarium in a prime position on the boy’s bureau, complete with thoughtful touches like a ceramic Imagitarium Cozy Frog Cottage, which promised to transform living quarters into homey wonderlands for our finned friends.

      But then Bucky grew into a frog, stolid and still, and the boy grew bored. Bucky lived out his remaining seventeen years in a much-smaller aquarium on a counter in the kitchen behind the Nutribullet. I’m not big on science, but, I’ll be honest, this story grabbed me. It isn’t really about frogs, or even pets—it’s a meditation on what it means to be human. It’s about what we choose to pay attention to, and what habit makes us lose touch with. How we forget to actively love the things that ask the least of us. Definitely not what I expected to be mulling over on my Wednesday afternoon!