Cycles

A year ago today, an intrepid heating & A/C repairman helped me remove a dead and reeking possum from our furnace. A few days ago I caught a young possum in a live trap in the cellar. And this morning?

It was raining hard and steady when I let the dogs outside. Little Dixee immediately alerted on something and followed the scent all over the back yard, nose to grass, stub of a tail quivering like the needles on a polygraph. Jinx did his bidness and wanted back inside, but not the little dowager. I watched her as she tracked around and then finally reared up on her hind legs at the gate of the now-abandoned chicken pen. I assumed that whatever she was seeking had escaped over the gate. But an indistinct shape on the gate itself seemed through the curtain of rain to move, so I went closer.

Tangled in the deer netting that composes the main part of the gate was a small possum, a little larger than the one I trapped recently. It was wriggling just a bit, but when I neared and shined the light on it, the possum, went limp and let its jaw go slack. Classic possum-playing. I shooed Dixee away and took the creature by its tail, at which time it went full thespian and started secreting that foul stuff that makes its dead act so convincing.

“No need to put out all our tricks, fella,” I said. “I’m freeing you. Hang on.” I took the possum to the nearest fence abutting the pasture, a fence through which neither dog can pass, and lobbed it as gently as I could into the grass on the other side. A modest thump, and the little possum passed beyond my knowing.

Someday, I’ll tell you why we named our farm “Possum Cough.” It had nothing to do with the possums we’ve encountered while living here, and everything to do with an experience Mrs. Orr had when she was a child.

Someday, when a future American regime realizes that feeding devout Christians to lions really is a lot more fun than merely canceling them and ruining their finances, I may find myself on the floor of a well-lit, air-conditioned arena, waiting for the guards to release whatever hungry beasts are going to rip me into kibble. And I may watch their predatory faces with thin hope, hope that they have heard whispered in their dens and caves and warrens that a certain decrepit old man always spared and released animals who tangled themselves up in his worldly goods. I fantasize that they will treat me like a third-rate Daniel and sit placidly by instead of eating me.

The morning glories surrounding our place are in their last defiant blaze of beauty, coloring the countryside and keeping watch over field and rock and culvert. Their life-cycle is nearly at an end, as is the life-cycle of the bees who feed upon them. But next year, they will all return with that thrumming and green power that syncs with the season of Easter, of resurrection. I love each blossom, each leaf, knowing now that they are aware of my presence and perhaps of my benign presence among them, as benign as I can fashion it, anyway. It’s a rainy Friday in the fall of the year, and was there anything ever so glorious as this very moment?

~ S.K. Orr