I’ve just heard of the second relocation of a wild animal from an urban setting in the last fifteen hours, and today is my thirty-first anniversary of my high school graduation.
Of course they connect as all things do, and I asked one of the two relocators about the rationale of the damage they endured before action had to be taken. Here I was just curious; I wasn’t initially wondering about the perspective of a destructive groundhog though it may prove important later.
Discussions with the first relocator began very late last night before bed. My mother saw evidence of a racoon’s damage to her house earlier in the day, arranged for a trap to be set and now the racoon was in the trap cursing at her in Sicilian, no doubt. I spoke with her on the phone and remember telling her two things that were suddenly important to me. I inquired about the state of the roof damage because I wondered if there were racoon children still inside the roof while their mother was in the trap, and secondly I insisted that she let the roofer decide how to best take down the trap after he showed certainty of his capability of not falling off the roof because of insurance liability.
Conversations ensued during the day with comic effect. I kept calling the racoon “Ricky” because of a favorite stuffed animal I had as a child. The rest of my family called the racoon “Rocky” for the popular Beatles song. We are a family that revivifies, or personifies, depending on your perspective.
The second relocator had perennials that were damaged by a groundhog, and this was on my mind while I pondered a post about graduating high school so long ago.
I rarely have acknowledged it, I suppose because of a complete lack of a desire to acknowledge my own aging. But I must say that if I do look back, it’s with fondness. I had an intensely vivid imagination that could and would out-muscle my focus on life with very little effort. I enjoyed it then and even during the years where my grip on the sane part of life’s interactions were most strenous. I enjoy it now and my grip is better.
I could look at this in so many ways, many of them negative, but I refuse in much the same way I will float to the top if underwater. To say that there are times my thinking is the exact opposite would be an understatement. And as these mental wonderings are cyclical as the perennials the groundhog wanted to affect, so too are my reactions to them.
A groundhog affects perennials in a negative way and is relocated. For someone else the perennials were affected in a positive way and maybe the groundhog was given more. I hope I have the mental clarity to continue to view my mental wonderings as so many perennials with a possible groundhog or racoon, whose reason is mine to ponder.
Matt "Quiddity" McGovern's Blog 