But it is possible, it is possible: the old grief, by a great mystery
of human life, gradually passes into quiet, tender joy.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
“No kill!” the exterminator said at my sucked-in breath when he knocked mistakenly at my door and handed me his card, both hands raised as if we were shadow-boxers.
My neighbors spotted the fox first through their backyard security camera and their Google Nest doorbell. They started texting me photos of the fox running between our yards, once with a rat clenched between her teeth that was so much the size of a guinea pig that I found it much more alarming than the fox. At dark, I noticed my neighbors began flicking their backyard floodlights on and off to daze, I guessed, the improbable fox with light, and, in doing so, blotted out another elusive spot of the suburban darkness I hear we keep losing.
I was not impressed. I was a recent graduate of a popular Denver Audubon’s Community Naturalist class, delivered the spring before by the oxymoron of Zoom, the years’ long waiting list for the class suspended by the pandemic’s quarantine. Exactly who wants to explore the fecund world of cormorant rookeries and river wetlands and sandstone hogbacks through the auspices of PowerPoint?
But I needed to connect to something outside my own world. My 88-year-old mother those dark COVID days lived sequestered and untouchable in an assisted living apartment, stroking out, we discovered too late, when she reported over the phone one day that she was “too blind” to find the TV remote. And my husband stayed burrowed down in our family room, his head deep in a book on black holes and string theory—that universe so far beyond me—the meniscus of his knee torn and his small intestine erratic enough that it would soon deliver us to an outpatient recovery room.
“I’ll let you have a few moments alone,” I remember the dark-haired nurse murmuring as she drew the curtains around the hospital recovery bed after my husband’s exploratory colonoscopy. Or I think I remember this—the memories we all carry with us, I’ve since learned, fallible, because they are, according to a reputable journal I read, “in an unstable state, rewritten and remodeled every time [they are] retrieved.” But my husband was woozy, I know that, and crowing, loudly, over the beauty of drugs. I held his cold chapped hands, waiting to hear the doctor’s exploratory report, words my befuddled husband couldn’t grasp yet, but what would send me later to sit alone in the aching infinities of our own HOA park bench.
Soon, I realized that our neighbors, on the darkest of nights, were creeping out into the spill of floodlight and towing behind them an ancient chihuahua they called, “Baby,” swaddled in a red sweater, so it could pee in safety. Theirs or the chihuahua’s, I’m not sure.
My neighbors had called the exterminator.
Some 30 years ago, a porcupine tapped its quills on our back sliding glass door. Night. Suburbia. Our family room light leaking over the quivering spines. And then the porcupine disappeared, scrabbled, we guessed, back under the rotting privacy fence that our family mutt chewed on, the side-yard I walked into to find it gone hushed and wild.
I pinned the family room curtains back that whole fall, hoping for the porcupine’s return. Never once had we imagined that night and its hairless-soled apotheosis, messenger of what I couldn’t guess, stepping out of the dark, when we loaded up our U-Haul with twin high chairs and matching cribs to drive out of west Denver, drive out of the tiny brick house my husband’s “old maid” aunts built a century past in a neighborhood of Orthodox Jews— long before the broken bottle shards in the West Colfax gutters we stepped over, long before the occasional prostitute at the bus stop or the corner Frank’s Bar BQ or the odd little drug depot dispensing wares we couldn’t imagine then, the Orthodox Jews rolling their baby carriages past it, and us, on High Holy nights.
You see, I was washing bottles and baby trays in the open kitchen window of West Denver one day. It was late spring. Writing this, I can still smell the spill of lilac from the neighbor’s yard and the newly washed baby hair of the twin daughters my husband and I had prayed for. But, I was watching the man watching me. He strode back and forth along our alley fence, a few strands of garden wire, really, and a sagging gate we clicked open and shut on trash days, its metal latch so white-hot mid-summers that I still feel its burn.
And then the man urinated. And smiled at me.
But here’s the miracle I want to wonder at first, if memory in all its shiftings and evolutions, its long erosions, could still for just a moment: that a few years later, after this man in the city alleyway unknowingly shepherded us (or so I thought then)—me, a young, frightened mother—into the suburbs, at a time when the earth, without us even knowing it, was already flush in the midst of what the scientists call, “a sixth extinction event,”—a slow-boil of ancient glaciers and flood volcanism—a porcupine shuffled across a lighted suburban street just to gaze in at us.
Here’s what I’ve learned about community naturalists: they’re like the writer. Notice, the naturalist kept saying to me and my ten-person pandemic Zoom class that spring. Wonder. Remember. Naturalists identify things. They trace the web of things, everything having a reason for being, a coming and a going. Like writing. Like the porcupine. Like those young Orthodox mothers in bronze-gilded wigs and white stockings, who ignored me, the shiksa, as they strolled their baby carriages along our tiny block of retired rabbis, tattooed neighbors, and short-chained dogs. Like the man who peed in the city alleyway, too, and that other man, from my girlhood, I am realizing now, that man so much deeper in my memory, wedged, as a matter of fact, into that little nut-shaped amygdala where memory welds with emotion to become primal and fixed within us, the man who, I said to myself even today, I would not mention, but have, though if this were my student’s story now, I must admit, I would urge, “Write more deeply about this.” But I won’t. Not here. Yet.
I know the fox was a she because the professional pest exterminator that my neighbors called told me so.
To be fair, the loving Dads, the age of my daughters, had adopted a little boy named Noah the year before COVID. I remember sitting outside in our backyard, in all that great stillness, and listening to the baby babble floating over me like silver notes of a wind chime.
Little Noah wanted to play in the backyard now, where the fox defecated.
“Just to find out,” the Dads both reassured me and so we plunged ankle-deep together through the heavy sno-cones of spring in our running shoes and rubber clogs to follow the “humane” exterminator between our backyards in search for the signs of a fox den.
“If she’s carrying the kill in broad daylight,” the pest exterminator said, “it’s for her kits.”
Notice. Wonder. Remember. I remember the hand of a mole I found once, quarter-sized, with five long nails compressed together and a barely discernable “thumb” attached to the wrist bone. It was 1968. Fifty-four years ago. A thousand miles from where I sit in this quiet study, still in the same Denver suburb where once a porcupine, for the briefest of moments, appeared. I try to imagine what the world was like when I was ten and still a child unknowing of what was to come, untouched yet by that man I simply can’t forget alongside a cemetery I don’t want to remember, but do, because my brain has fixed him in the flesh and synapse of me. I called the mole’s hand a fairy’s hand. That year, a ship honeycombed in aluminum orbited men around the dark side of the moon. Our summer cistern gone dry, I remember how I could walk out at night so fearless through the drenched chicory to crouch and pee in the Indiana shadows, while men floated above me to catch in a photograph what no one had imagined, least of all of me—the blue and beautiful earth in earthrise above the crater of a moon.
The word “porcupine” means quill pig in Latin, what I looked up tonight, inglorious name for our suburban night visitor, rodent that it was, all those years ago when I was a young mother of twins. The experts say that falling into memory and wondering about the past and the future—part of that naturalist’s creed of Notice. Wonder. Remember—is a way of “rehearsing our own autobiographies,” our own lives written how we would want them to be. I know now that it was this man, this stranger of childhood harm and my memories of him, who sent me from the tiny brick house in West Denver to the suburbs and its porcupine, and not the pacing alleyway man, who taunted me, grown woman that I was, through a rusty garden fence. But in 1968, I was ten, not yet 13, playing in the dust of a passing pickup on a sodden summer day in Indiana and I mourn that girl who found the little boney hand she couldn’t name yet and who slipped it into a peeling jewelry box she had found in the hayloft of her father’s barn, a jewelry box she filled with horse hair nests, and blue sea fossils, and a little woven chrysalis tied to a grass stalk from her father’s pond that she can still dangle from her hands today and wonder at.
The fox had finally napped in our backyard a day or two before the exterminator showed up. She wrapped herself around the frozen perennial she yanked up from my garden bed, a golden-haired halo in the late winter light.
“We see more wild animals here than at the cabin,” my husband declared, peering out the kitchen window. And he was right. There’s a term I’ve learned called, the “urban wildlife paradox,” and the fox is certainly part of that paradox. It seems that sometimes the developed areas we live in, like squared-off suburbs with their baseball fields and overgrown drainage ditches, can be more bio diverse than the areas we call wild.
Hence the spiny presence of that porcupine all those years ago.
There is so much more to know about the porcupine that I didn’t notice then at the patio door when it looked in at us: how the rattle of its quills can turn to music in our hands; how the ancient kings and queens of Africa plugged the hollows of porcupine quills with gold dust; how easily quills fall out of the porcupine. And how readily the porcupine bends and re-bends in the mind remembering.
Thirty years ago in West Denver, the urban wildlife was cats: dozens of them, we discovered one day. Years, Mrs. Lesser, our long-widowed neighbor, sat by her barred and locked kitchen window eating her meals at a small linoleum table, a few cats we could see silhouetted against the window screen and rubbing against her hair, which shone in the light like dandelion fluff.
And now memory I thought lost awakens again. The winter night my husband and I drove our four lbs. preemies home from the ICU, Mrs. Lesser left a casserole dish at our door in the subfreezing cold. The girls could just swallow eye-droppers of the milk I pumped at home and sent Leonard to the intensive care with, two weeks waiting for them, sick and hollow-eyed from a pregnancy that had left me tilted upside down on a hospital bed, breathless with Terbutaline until the dropping of the babies’ heart beats and the sudden emergency C-section, my husband stumbling outside in surgical slippers and paper hat to fumble for coins at the corner parking meter. I started up Mrs. Lesser’s front walk to thank her, my whole new life vanishing for that moment as I shut the car door behind me, still aching, my forgotten daughters asleep in the car.
“The babies, the babies,” my husband yelled into the dark.
Finally, one spring, Mrs. Lesser opened her windows to air out her house, a putrid wind of sodden cat litter that soaked into everything curling out, the babies I brought out to sun and me pressed to the other neighbor’s lilacs. Someone called animal control and I watched as cat after cat, some weepy-eyed, encrusted, were loaded into white animal carriers and stacked into a van, Mrs. Lesser, who I walked towards again, silent at her back door.
I disobeyed our governor’s mandate to “stay home” those two weeks I took the naturalist class during the pandemic. I drove furtively along rivers and back canyons up and down to the cabin we built at the back skirts of Pike’s Peak 15 years ago. In 1962, seven years before I found the mole hand and 30 years before the porcupine in the suburbs stopped at our backdoor to wonder at us, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring with its warning of DDT and paper-thin egg shells. And the oil slicks of a river burned until 1969. And I grew up hearing about the acid rains of Canada and the demise of trees because of paper products, long before the invention of the Internet, long before the tree-boring pine beetle and the ash locust.
Yet that first year of Covid, 50 years after Carson’s warning, when the whole world shut down—because I want to remember here what is joyful, too— I could still drive past clear rivers where the fishing lines of stealthy fly fishermen laced the air with their casts of gold, and beloved eagles brooded in the tree snow. And a suburban porcupine visited me. And then a fox. And long after I left my father’s farm and the cemetery in front of it to live out the rest of my life, long after the neighboring gravedigger’s house was torn down, and the Catholic milk farmer’s pastures were sold to subdivisions, so many deer leapt from the twilight fields that my father had to wire bells to the front of his car.
Perhaps the urban wildlife paradox means something good. Perhaps I need not mourn what’s to come, or past.
On our cabin porch, far above the suburbs, far from my mother dying day by day, quarantined and alone, and my husband still deep in the darkness of an illness he no longer spoke with me about, but would soon recover from, where the spring wind battered at my laptop, I would listen to the Zoom naturalists describe from their book-ladened studies and kitchen tables our biosphere as if they were reciting the most beautiful of poems: Denver once had no blue jays, but does… like pears the nests bushtits weave… songbirds have two voice boxes… and the teeth of rodents never stop growing… and our pine cones close in the rain to shelter seed, wingless and winged.
I think about that jewelry box that I keep close in the closet of my study. It is the manifestation of what, exactly? “Dead Box,” I called it, this jewelry box I kept from the ruined trunk in a hayloft that my father broke open for me so that I could spend a lifetime carrying it with me to sow an image or a metaphor in the poetry workshops I teach, so many of the childhood things I filled it with, and still love and remember, long ago pilfered or lost: red flint I found at my father’s pond crowned by gold citrine, a snail petrified in a bloody-toothed gastropod shell I would rub my thumb against, and all those eggshells—of speckled seas and hollowed moons— I blew to blue dust. Are these the vestiges of an almost 65-year life spent searching for something beautiful?
Notice. Wonder. Remember. A student editor for the newspaper of the community college I taught at for 15 years called me to ask about a small chapbook of poems I wrote from the cabin porch that same spring I took the Zoom naturalist course.
“Is your poetry called ‘prose poetry’ because it doesn’t rhyme?” he asked. “And why is there nostalgia in these poems, your mother sometimes appearing?”
“Because she was dying,” I said.
But he made me feel faintly ashamed that I had written about these memories: a ridiculous, I’ll say, “almost old” woman who stows the leftovers of fossorials in paper towels in an abandoned jewelry box, and writes still of her mother and father and who madly loves the slightly-haired bones of a mole’s hand—a hand that for millions and millions of years toiled to turn the earth, to let something green rise out of the subsurface dark, like the mole of memory that digs its solitary tunnels into the dirt of our childhoods to see what might blossom.
Do not write of this and that, I think I have been told my entire life—of dead mothers, fathers, vanished girlhoods, long-ago men and cemeteries. Yet, here in this Dead Box are the broken and the whole that I have loved, found beneath the pin oaks and the red maples of my childhood, buried in the ruts of my father’s Ford tractor and the muddy hoof prints of our angus cows, and, here, now, in this suburb, in this golden light of a jewelry box, its crumpled loam I keep holding in my hands. And that is what matters and who I am.
At the nature center in Aspen where my daughter works, I have walked through the naturalist’s familiar treasures of molted feathers and curved-tooth skulls and the regurgitated owl pellets that tiny children will poke for the bones and bird claws that I, too, dig for and touch in awe. In the suburbs of Cincinnati, long before I knew what a writer or a naturalist or a memory was, long before the farms of Indiana and Murdock, Ohio, I would pull rocks and fossils like fists from the cul-de-sac creeks—memories returning again—and ink them with names I identified from the science books my mother and father bought me. I would walk down the basement stairs to my father’s office, all stained concrete and dark wood panel fashioned by my grandfather, and sit on a metal stool beneath a poorly-hung fluorescent light at a primitive two-by-four work bench, hammered together by my grandfather. And then I would heat the lab flasks that I had forgotten about until this very moment, writing this, my pixie-haired head wrapped in huge plastic goggles as I swirled together the chemicals I would need to witness the smoke and fire only I could create.
Have you ever held the shell of something in your hand for a long time and loved it, yet never known that until one day, a half-life later, you remember? Like I am, today? In my jewelry box, there is the shell of a moon sail, all spiral and tiny umbilicous that dots the night when moon snails float to the bottom of an ocean and bury themselves into sand, each one birthing a thousand. Here is Time, I keep thinking, and memory, and I rub my finger along the little cave of the moon snail’s opening: an aperture flooding light.
To finish my story, as I must, the Dads and I learned that the fox probably slept in my back garden sun to escape her young for a rest. We learned that the concrete patios of our suburban houses float on wood scaffolding with no backfill: perfect spots for the digging of a fox den. I thought the fox a dog, like so many, the first morning I spotted it asleep in our backyard, its dark-dipped ears tippling at the shouts of my visiting great niece and nephew, all muffled by the window, this fox not like the caved-in runt I once watched from the car as it trotted midday down a neighboring sidewalk years ago—memory, once again, ticking in with its own stories.
“Not here!” the exterminator finally proclaimed and handed me another calling card, just in case I really wanted to call him to exterminate the fox if it should return.
“$1,500 to relocate,” he said in parting. “But, of course, 99 percent of wild animals relocated die.” And then he gave me a plastic cockroach locked in a sandwich baggie to remember him by and I placed it in the orchid on the breakfast table to surprise my husband.
Tonight, I can’t sleep.
Outside, it is suburban and wild. And a fox sleeps silver-haired under an old moon as lit and cratered as the shell of an old moon snail I am loving now. And 30 years ago, a porcupine tapped at our backdoor and stayed. And stayed. And I have held in my hand the hand of a mole for 54 years.
Tell me, what else shall I remember?
