There's a 'Possum Under the Porch, Daddy

In an earlier diary entry I write about hating opossums and it's true , I find them ugly and prehistoric: what do they DO for the planet? Walking home early evening, I see a young opossum lurking under the porch and then, like the wind, gone, underneath the caboose, not even a shadow remaining.

Something shifted in my heart. I held my breath between my teeth like a small puff of smoke. I remembered that in the animal kingdom, when a young animal can feed itself, run and hide, the mother moves on to make another nest and another set of young in the months to come. This opossum looked like he's just been left to himself. The two sides of myself were at war. Did I get the hose and shoo him away from under the caboose, or did I set out a little bit of dry cat food in an old pie tin? The war didn't last long. I capitulated almost before I found the little puff of smoke had disappeared from the edge of my incisors and the rattle of cat food on tin became music, the way the beating of an irregular heart can be. I remembered that four years ago I had folded an old holey towel into a square and knotted it inside a plastic Chinatown shopping bag to keep the dampness from creeping into the cloth. I had hidden it under the veranda for a semi-feral cat Frenchie , who I suspect has died by now. He wasn't young, I had nursed him through so many problems and got very little thanks for my work, though once he was so sick, after I had forced antibiotics and ear mite meds into him, I had swaddled him tight in a towel so he wouldn't scratch me to hell and back, I sang lousy in French to him my deep and abiding love. He would disappear for months and then show up, either fit as a fiddle or barely alive and the circle of health would start over again. It's been over a year since I've seen him this time and I don't think he's capable of being taken in by a family or a person even, he was that wild, so I am fearing he is dead. I gave him the last eight years of his life, fine quality, from meds to chopped chicken livers, so I have no guilt, I just miss him, even though he was so brutal to me with his claws on my forearms. I had put the towel out for him when we first made aquaintance. It wasn't until the heavy rains began that I made a bed on the porch itself under a bit of roof, so he could stay warm and dry and he would sleep in there, or on those days when it rained all day every day for weeks, he would live in there, coming out to eat and drink some water, rush out under a tree and perform his ablutions, then run back into the warmth where I would dry him off and leave him be. I promise you, I have no intention of doing all of that for the opossum. I will feed him occasionally and leave the folded towel under the porch. There seemed to be a small indentation in the middle of the square. I said to myself, I'll bet that lil' ol' opposum is sleeping there these cold nights.

I'm still afraid to look at them up close, those sharp teeth, those almost red eyes, the small powder puff of pink nose that if you blink seems to fade into the night, but I have found the compassion that the Samaritan had for his stranger on the roadside and I am sneaking catfood out when I can.

My continued relationship with wild animals is probably the only secret I have from my husband, because he remembers when we first moved out here to the caboose and in the abandoned house before us were at least twelve cats and or kittens of various injuries, deformities and stages of starvation. We had a little bit of harvest money left and I went to the feedstore and bought a big ol' bag of dry catfood and a couple of tins of wet food, because I noticed there were two females, both knocked up past the time to do anything about it. If we were going to have kittens we were going to have healthy kittens. There was a nasty ol' junk pile in the back of the house where those mother cats lived in order to be protected from the raccoons and opossums. I noticed, sure enough when the kittens were born and old enough to tumble out from under old car parts, undefinable pieces of metal and scrap lumber, that if they didn't get back under the pile with their mamas, by nightfall, who by the way nursed each other kittens, the raccoons were libel to get them and the next day I would see just a tiny kitten paw or two on the ground and I would just stand there and sob. So I was no friend to the larger feral animal. I think he assumes I am done, since there are no more feral cats. He hasn't yet realized that I have grown braver and taken on the larger feral animals, just not getting close, not yearning to cuddle and sing to them.

It took me seven years to get rid of all the cats, catins and kittens, but finally there was one left, who we believe lived here with the previous tenants and was left for one reason or another. I named him Capt'in because he was captain of his own fate and made us take him into our hearts and incidently, our kitchen.

So what's this got to do with one youth of a opossum? That simple word: vulnerability. My heart is vulnerable to any animals or human who is in need. My husband, like Dorothy Day, cooks at the local Catholic church for the homeless or the poor and the hungry, and because I'm disabled, I'm left to care for the animal kingdom, which is a far easier job. But the benefits are better I think. After awhile, my creatures allow me to pick them up and croon to them, and the most Daniel receives is a handshake and a "Thanky Sir", which isn't enough, because Dan is a real hugger. But he respects the need for space from the mentally ill, the disenfranchised, the lost and lonely and puts his whole heart into that single handshake. We both have our tasks in the world of entropy and we do it with all our hearts.