Night watch

Sudden yowls, shufflings, pungent sulfurous smells, the lid of the bin of grass seed dislodged again, tomatoes toothed and tossed: the night creatures are around, cats, skunks, coons. Mice I'm sure are busy and perhaps owls too but it's that trio of prowlers that takes over the yards in my neighborhood, looking, in the case of coons and skunks for what we've left out, in the case of cats for rodents.

You have your routes and rounds. You take note what is almost ripe and make sure that you're the ones to get the enjoyment of it. You sniff, peer, finger. You pounce.

Last night, talking about the movies we'd just watched, we caught strong whiffs of skunk (it wasn't us threatening you) that let us know that while Damon's Tom Ripley was contiving on screen, you, Mr Skunk, were testing the lids of things outside.

We humans have a tendency to occupy everything: the sea as well as the land, the sky as well as the land, and the dark as well as the light. I'm glad that when we're done with cultivating, controlling or exploiting for the day, and withdraw to our castles, you, unperturbed, though often touchy, move in. You can be pestilential (but so can we) but I say, have the zone of obscurity, occupy the darkness.

Not yet this year but soon I plan to go tenting. The wild things are more numerous and bigger out there in the forest, on the mountain, and there'll be just fabric between us. I can hear rustlings and squeaking then that I miss in my solid dwelling, other forms and styles of life going on. It's nice to know ours is not the only busyness going on.