Raccoon Lives Here

Living with bears has its charms, but living with raccoons is much more mysterious. Mostly I don’t see them because they are nocturnal. In the summer, they do hang around in the mid to late afternoon, wandering by on the deck within a few feet of us and studiously ignoring us. The rest of the year, my direct experience of them is mostly on sleepless nights when I can hear them when they drop down out of the maple tree and entertain themselves by marching around on the roof.

But my awareness of them is pretty constant, even if I am not actually seeing or hearing them. They leave a trail of a sort with their various activities. Over the past few months, they have been digging up the yard, the gardens, the pathways. I guess they’re looking for bugs and stuff to eat, but every morning there are dozens of holes here and there throughout the yard…often holes five-eight inches deep and as big across. Every morning, I go around and cover the holes back up, and so we engage. They dig, I cover, they dig, I cover. I don’t mind their digging, but I’d just as soon not have holes to trip on or fall into, so I cover.

At the moment, I have several flats sitting around outdoors with seeds planted. At night, I cover them with glass. I take the glass off during the day, but yesterday I forgot to put the glass back on the flat with 2-leaf lupines just starting to rise to consciousness. This morning, someone had been digging in the flat, little piled up piles of dirt and corresponding holes in about four places, one of which places had previously contained a standing up lupine plantlet. The raccoons, I guess. Looking for God knows what. But it occurred to me that while I think this is my house, my yard, my garden that they are endlessly messing with, it is possible that the raccoons think it is their house (they traipse around under the house as well as on the roof), their yard, their garden. Every night when they come out of their lairs, I'm thinking, their first job is to check all the environs to see what mess I’ve been making, what new intrusions I’ve come up with for no discernible reason. ‘People,’ they say, ‘What’s the point of them?’ And to the babies, they say, ‘Stay away from them; don’t even look at them when you go by.’ And this is how we more or less successfully share our world.