June 14, 2010

I have the afternoon off. I was puttering in the garden, planting some seeds and transplanting the too crowded beets in anticipation of some rain. I moved some black-eyed susans from the flower garden into the field to speed up the naturalization process. They are one of those favorite flowers of mine. They were my mother’s too. In her garden/yard in suburban Connecticut she let the back yard go wild and create a lively field of yellow. Some neighbors didn’t like that she didn’t mow her lawn, but passersby often stopped to ask what the yellow flower was in the yard; some people even came back for seeds.

The rain did begin and drove me in. I guess I wasn’t too driven to work in the yard.
So here I write. Last night, I went to take kitchen scraps to the compost and saw what I at first mistook for my cat. Then I realized it was my friend the skunk. I skirted the composter and put the scraps on the edge of the garden. He ambled away, but it looked like he came back as the new scraps were gone this afternoon. Seeing the skunk got me to thinking about skunk tails or is it tales. I am sure everyone has a skunk story or two in their lives. I have at least three very memorable ones. The wildest was probably about a year ago. I had gotten home from work, went to shut the chickens in and stuck my head in through their little door. I can see their heads hanging over their roosting box. They were there and I shut the door. The next morning I went to feed them and give them water. As I opened the two people doors I saw that my girls had had a nightly visitor, wearing black and white, and a very strong perfume. Inadvertently, I left the door between the front of the shed and the chicken’s space open as I quickly fled. I opened their door and ran inside. I figured the skunk would amble out and that would be that. Well….The next morning I noticed that the grain bag had been torn into and corn was everywhere. I did a quiet search and found the skunk sleeping soundly with what was probably a very full belly behind some scrap boards that I was always going to use for shelves. I could not imagine how I was going to evict my unwanted resident. I contemplated setting up a stereo on the further side of the shed and plugging it in at the house so that the noise would scare him out. I opted first for a gentler approach. Since it was sleeping, I very cautiously took the corn out of the shed and into the house. Without the food that night, he decided to go off and look for grubs or whatever. Luckily, when I could have come face to face with the skunk, it was not at the chicken door. Luckily too that I was later observant enough to realize it was still around and I did not bumble in too noisily and quickly. There are other skunk stories to tell, but I will let them wait.