Seeing Light


Dear Eugene,

No more backyard crawlers trouble for me this year, touch wood.  In fact the trouble is no more because woods were touched.

Every fall and winter since I moved into this house more than a decade ago I'd been struggling with one sort of unwanted neighbor or another.  A big family of skunk would hide underneath my shed and crawl out for meals after nightfall.

Last May I wrote this: "This morning I looked out my kitchen window and found big patches of my lawn being opened up like crude drug-store novels, folded and curled. Raccoon(s). Skunk(s). It was artfully done, I must say. I dutifully spent an hour to remove and reinstall my stratagem of garden nets (which they outwitted), closing up all the scattered books, which, upon closer examination, looked more like failed open-heart surgeries. Mud splattered all over my legs. I tried not to swear (and failed). What a bloody mess."

In a way that's how things should work, that this homeowner should welcome the homeless and sponsor the dispossessed.  I might have cursed while cleaning up the mess but it was never at my "frenemies."

Last summer I had the shrubs enclosing my backyard cut to less than half in length to avoid another unwholesome display of them bowing down to no particular god after wind or snow.  The land becomes a different world with new light breaking in.  Darkness no longer has a place to hide--a very trite image but that's exactly what it is--unhabitable to night shades.

So if I've been seeing the world from the vantage of the crawlers I might have come up with this solution sooner.  I think that's the easy moral of the story.  That's if we think moral is easy.

My feeling is I could definitely do without a decade of struggle if I could choose, but if it is up to me to have the foresight and erase the many mornings of bloody mess I would also lose the imagination to cross the Red Sea.

Yours, Alex

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