The little raccoon is driving me to distraction. I think someone tamed him and he has decided I’m his mommy and if I venture out onto the deck at dusk he will come running, his little hands scritching on the deck boards and his tawny snout lifted in entreaty. And of course, fool that I am, I fed him cat food. To keep my little dog quiet because my little dog is very angry. He is about the same size as the raccoon and they literally face off at 4:00 a.m. every day with nothing but a sheet of glass between snouts. I have to be careful not to let them meet. But it is the 4:00 a.m. feeding that is becoming arduous. I’d rather be sleeping than feeding wildlife. But he sits at the door as if waiting to come in like a cat. If I feed him early then the foxes and the skunk, well they will take his food and he will pester me all the more by agitating the dog.
He lifts up his little hands as if in prayer, there in the sable darkness of the night where you can barely see the moon. He is all alone out there in the woods.
Last year I had a family of six raccoons visiting… a proud mother and her brood. I knew not to feed them. But not this year. This year it is only Godot the raccoon. He is out there with the sooty air and the silence of the crows. The crows are far away. Sometimes I think I hear them in the distance but truthfully they have not yet come back. The stillness in the wake of their leaving is full of high concentrations of fine particulate matter from the northern fires. Standing outside breathing in the landscape catches scratches in your throat. Instead of crows I hear the sounds of planes hauling water. At least I hope that’s what they are and not Russia or China or Iran or some defined enemy of the people scouting out destruction. It would not surprise me anymore. The way that the world is.
We sure picked a time to be alive, as far as picking anything goes. This too shall pass. In whatever way that passes. In blood and anger or in quiet desperation or in compassionate resignation or in a calculated resistance or even a spiritual fullness. Right now it seems the mooing herds are becoming a more and more ravenous pack of wolves stalking justice, hunting vengeance. They are still patient with the hunt and distracted as they can easily be sometimes are presently left snarling at each other in their respective cages. For now.
Truth is, the mooing herds corralled in cultural hell worlds were never cows. Not really. They were always wolves. A wolf can never become a cow no matter how much you feed them hay and sunlight. And the wolves patience is wearing thin like a spiderweb now—a gust of wind in the wrong direction and the web is broken and the prey is lost.
When waiting for Godot, these are the kinds of things you think of because the good things seem far away now. The bright-sided malarkey of our latest age relegated to fantasy. I know that next year or maybe the next, the fields of blueberries in the burnt out fields will be lush and the wildlife will be well fed because that is the way of nature. It is a kind of miracle. I know Godot will not need me then. He will be foraging frogs plump from the bugs of blueberry blossoms. And I will feed the crows again.
Around us, people are mooing or snarling and the smoke thickens.
Really nicely written piece.
"Waiting for Godot"...
I, too, have fed the occasional raccoon.
I swear they have watches, or some kind of timepiece.
I won't feed the squirrels, red, gray, or black, we simply have too many.
I affectionately refer to them as "tree rats".