In the Woods, Past, Present and Future

March 8

I took a walk this morning in the woods next to the school where I teach, and I imagined I was in the same woods I roamed when I was a boy on Long Island, although I’m now 42 and live in the hills of western Massachusetts. I imagined these were the same pines I smelled, the same sharp air I breathed, and the same birdsong I followed, often barefoot down sandy paths. And, as I walked, I looked ahead to when I'll be an old man passing under the same bare oaks my children will someday pass under when they are old and their children will pass under when they are old, and I am gone. At some point, I noticed a coyote track, a single pawmark in the mud in the middle of the trail. The mud was soft and wet and the print was fresh. I can see the coyote leaping from the dark on one side of the trail, making a brief landing here, and then disappearing into the brush on the other side.

Broken Nest

A couple of weeks ago, Lisa walked me to the sliding glass door. "Look" she said, pointing at our vegetable garden: A squirrel, its mouth stuffed with leaves, scurried over the roof of the garden shed and slipped through a tiny hole at the top of the doors. "Shit," I said. "It's making a nest." Two days later, I shoveled some snow from in front of the doors, pulled them open, and stood looking at a globe of tightly wound leaves, string, a pair of stockings and dried grass, and poking out of the center like a tiny ball, a squirrel's head, darting left to right. "Back up, Patrick," I said, having a cartoonish vision of the squirrel jumping out and latching onto my son's face like a starfish. "It's just a squirrel," he said, not listening. I knew I had to get the squirrel out of the shed because spring was coming and I had all my garden tools in there, so I poked the nest with a shovel, but the head just dove inside. I could have walked away. Keeping the door open. The squirrel would have scattered, but I was curious. I wanted to see the squirrel again. I hooked the nest with the shovel and pulled and the squirrel shot into the air like a water-rocket. "Run," I screamed at Patrick. He walked back a few steps, watching the squirrel dart up a tree. And then, the cries. Tiny high pitched whimpers. Coming from the broken nest. "Patrick," I said. "Go inside." "Why?" he asked. "Just go inside." He listened this time and walked away. I stepped closer and looked down, pink and bare, the baby squirrel on the white snow. In the shed, there were three more. I looked at the sliding glass door, where Lisa stood with Patrick. I raised my arms. "What?" Lisa said. I couldn't speak. I just raised my hands again. The mother made noises from a branch on the white pine above me. What had I done? I mouthed the words "babies" to Lisa and then I looked back at the shed. I bent down and scooped the baby on the snow onto a piece of cardboard. I tried to place it back onto the shelf where the tangled globe once was, but its leg snagged a piece of string and it hung there above its siblings, swaying frantically. I juggled its leg loose and it fell with the others, all crying now; the mother making noises above. I did not know what to do. I covered them with the leaves that had fallen onto the snow, closed the door and walked away. Inside, I did a Google search and read that the mother may return to take the babies away if you leave the nest alone. I did, for two days, and then returned. I opened the door, feeling uneasy about what I might find. I flipped through the leaves, and the string. Nothing. The babies were gone. Thankfully taken away.

Wild Visitor: Waiting for Gray Fox's Return

Thursday, July 31. 5:30 a.m.

The above image is not mine.

I sit on a small couch with my son Patrick squeezed beside me. He's watching My Little Pony on a laptop as I read. But, my periphery stands guard, looking out the front door.

I see a hydrangea flower, a lavender globe in the lower left of the door's frame; its backdrop is the grooved bark of a pitch pine, straight-backed and rising out of the frame.

Buddhist flags, a string of color (blue, white, red, yellow and green) cross the entire frame, ending before complete.

Beyond, a flower garden, a few orange lily buds yet to bloom, and a giant sunflower at the edge of the empty road, its face turned towards light to come.

I imagine the gray fox stepping into this frame as it did two days earlier.

I picture its shy but swift step materializing bit by bit from behind the pitch pine, crossing in front of the flower garden, under the flags, a moment so brief, as it comes-- and then I leap!

"What are you doing?'' Patrick calls, as I run to the door.

"The fox, I thought I saw the fox."

A tumble of gray limbs had streaked across the frame. I open the door and step outside.

The air is cold.

I walk around the corner of the yard, my nerves alert. I flinch when a branch cracks underfoot.

I look around the back, down the forsythia edge.

Was it a bird? I wonder. Was it my imagination?

I go back inside, returning to my place on the couch, next to Patrick, who returns to My Little Pony.

And I look to the pitch pine, under the Buddhist flags, and sense the moment is already gone.

Wild Visitors: Gray Fox

The teetering moment between night and dawn, fog wetting the air and circling the teepee of green polebeans which twists up like a wizard's cap on the soggy earth, a point among rumpled kale leaves, and then! And then! A gray fox, lighter than the fog itself, with a smoky tail trailing behind, steps through my field of vision and I rise and move swiftly to the door to see, but the fox has gone. I look in the tangled forsythia and behind the shed and at the edge of a small patch of woods, but nothing, only cool air in the blue morning.