Little Things

I sat up late Friday night watching Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. Fatigue forced me to watch the conclusion the next day; I awoke at 200 am with my head on Bluebelle’s hip. I believe we were both snoring. My heart is sad this morning, but it has nothing to do with the brooding Danish prince.

Yesterday morning, while the sun was slanting down through the trees, I went to walk in the woods. The beams of light from our life-giving star were as solid as blonde pine joists, as substantial as anything into which I might drive a nail, as anything onto which I might hang an old family photograph. I was down in the warm middle of my own thoughts as I climbed the hill in the woods, nearing the secret place where Bonnie rests beneath her cairn of mountain stones. And then a large buck, a six-pointer, leapt to his feet from where he had been resting in a knot of weeds. He snorted and stamped one foot, but he did not run. We stared at each other for a moment, and then I raised my hands as if the buck were pointing a Colt at me, and I backed away, and we watched each other, and then I turned and retraced my steps. By the time I turned around again, I was down the hill and could not see whether or not he was still standing there. Right now, with the chilly rain tapping on the metal roof, I can still see him in the drawer where I placed him inside of me, in the bureau where I keep these little things for later.

Later in the morning while puttering around in the yard, I felt that urge come upon me, the familiar one that impels us to seek out small, private rooms. But I was on my farm, with no one in eyesight, ringed by fences and trees and buildings, and I exercised that sweet and inexpressibly arrogant prerogative, the landowning man’s privilege. I unzipped and watered the grass and sighed the most unfeigned of all sighs, scanning the ridge three miles away where a tidy little white house, ringed by a white vinyl picket fence, stands sentry on a high clearing. Movement to my left caught my attention and I looked over. A plump gray squirrel was sitting ten feet from me, up on his haunches, a massive black walnut in his teeth. I watched him and he watched me. I think he was mesmerized by the stream I was producing in the rug of moss on the side of the house. He cocked his head in a cartoonish fashion. And then he came nearer. I was by then finished with my task, but I didn’t want to move; I wanted to see what the squirrel was going to do. He hopped towards me again, stopping less then three feet away. I could have tapped him with my left foot. The squirrel stared up at me and cocked his head to the other side. I opened my mouth to speak to him, and he turned and bounded away, towards the front of the house. I zipped up and looked around to see if anyone or anything else was nearby.

Mrs. Orr and I ran a few errands later in the morning, in search of a birthday gift for the eldest grandson. We were successful, and then later we found an antique mall and browsed there among the old books and LPs and cannister sets and living room suites. A stop at a grocery store and we headed home, down the back way through the tree tunnel that runs beside brooks and pastures and tobacco fields. We came around a bend in the road and a bald eagle, the first one either of us had ever seen in the wild, lifted from where he was sitting on a branch and soared past us. His wingspan must have been at least six feet, and I tried not to run off the road as we both turned in our seats and watched him glide under the gray sky across the fields and disappear into the wooded stretch through which we’d just driven. We talked about him for the next ten minutes, and he will never be lost to me, because there is a drawer in the bureau for him as well.

Late in the day, I sat on the back porch with Bluebelle while Mrs. Orr and JInx and Dixee napped inside. The hummingbirds visited with us and were very companionable. There were three of them, all females, and they sipped at the feeder and came to the porch and perched on the wire railings and watched man and dog. I was mindful that these little ones are storing up fuel for the soon-coming journey to the southlands, and I wondered again if any of the same ones will greet me some warm spring afternoon in the year of our Lord 2023. While the hummingbirds fed and squeaked and perched and zoomed and played, one of the chipmunks scavenged beneath the bird feeder for sunflower seeds, his quick movements too fast to follow, his sleek racing stripes contrasted with the grass and the seed hulls and the sighing trees towering over him. And I think I dozed.

Later, my beloved wife came outside and we went to the back fence and stood for a long time in the shifting light and watched a young buck, much smaller than the one I disturbed earlier. This one was a lean feller, and he was rubbing his itching antler spikes on the sapling growing next to Bonnie’s grave. He scrubbed and scrubbed, stretching his neck and angling his head, snorting in adolescent pleasure. He finally tired of his luxurious grooming and ambled up higher in the woods beyond our sight.

A little while after the young buck left, I was around the side of the house where I had encountered the voyeuristic squirrel. The painted door to the basement shone in the sun, and it reminded me that I have not checked the basement in at least a week. I descended the steps, opened the door, and reached around to flick on the light, wary of the rafters from which a hidden black snake once dropped down on my shoulders when I sauntered down into the gloom, daydreaming. I never daydream in the basement anymore.

I poked around down there, making sure there were no signs of any varmints or intruders, looking over at the furnace we bought two years ago, and remembering that the man who installed the original old furnace and heat pump many years ago had died last week. He was the father of the fellow who installed the new one, and he had accompanied his son during the installation, an easy-going and affable gentleman.

Some boxes with some Christmas things had slid over somehow and overturned onto their sides. When I began straightening them, I uncovered something I had forgotten, a small Hav-A-Hart live animal trap that I had placed there a few months ago when I thought I heard noises down there. The trap had been sprung long ago, and inside were the dessicated remains of a small possum. I went and fetched gloves and came back and removed the dried and picked-over little body. I carried it out into the yard. The small things down in the basement had cleaned the body thoroughly, leaving only fur and bones. I sifted the remains between my gloved fingers and found the jawbone, a triangle of tiny teeth. I took the handful of possum remnants up to the woods and placed them at the base of a poplar tree, and then I came down and tidied up the basement. I did not reset the trap.

Later, I sat again on the porch, awash in a deep sadness. I could not help but compare the dead possum to the frog I killed through my forgetfulness so many years ago by leaving him in a paint can on a summer day. My mind paced the floor of its own trap, exploring all the ways the little creature must have panicked, once trapped. Down there in the dark, unable to chew his way through metal, with no food and no water and no companionship. Hungry and thirsty and fearful, frantic at first, then resigned, then weak, then still and silent, and finally food for things smaller than himself, forgotten until being accidentally discovered  on a muted fall day by the unintentional author of his doom. Did he cry out? Did he plead for intervention, for assistance that never came?

And so I sat on the porch with a girl-dog and put myself on the rack because of the death of an unimportant possum I never even saw while he was alive. Through the years, I have been on the receiving end of many caustic remarks and insults and patronizing asides because of my tenderness towards living creatures, my saccharine sentimentality, my relentless anthropomorphizing of the little things that creep and crawl and scurry and scamper and fly and trot and run and gallop and soar. I have been mocked many times, but none of those saner people have ever been able to convince me that I am wrong. So it looks like I will wind up my days being silly about the little living things, about the creatures I find so mysterious and compelling and friendly and intelligent.

I am thinking of him at this moment. For now, until the pall of guilt subsides, I will think of the little possum, and I will say to him in my heart, I didn’t mean to.

I didn’t mean to.

~ S.K. Orr