Sherry Chandler

I must rather shamefacedly admit that I only managed to attend one day of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. I had been having my Ishmael moments for about a week, “growing grim about the mouth…a damp, drizzly November in my soul.” Abetted no doubt by this damp, drizzly March. I make a blanket apology here to anyone whose (I hope metaphorical) hat I may have knocked off. Last Friday night Thursday night (sheesh!), I came home and crashed and am still crashing even today. I’m not sure what has thrown me into such a state of deep exhaustion – Sideshow took a lot of work but not that much – so I think I’ll blame the raccoon.

For most of March we’ve been trying to dissuade this mother raccoon from whelping in our attic, but she turns out to have a much higher tolerance than I do for talk radio blaring all night. She didn’t even seem to mind the pans of ammonia and she wasn’t turned by my husband’s plywood barriers. In fact, she seemed able to slither through holes that would have frustrated a cat. So I have had several weeks of uneasy, Rush-Limbaugh-haunted (shudder) sleep and still, on Saturday evening, when we went up to check on the status of things, we found mother and babies chirring away.

TR, my husband, rescued a baby raccoon a couple of years ago and she followed him around like a puppy for several days before he could find a rehabilitator over in Lexington to take her in and return her to the wild. He is convinced that our new mother is Ursula, like Lassie, come home. But I’m not so sure. Raccoons seem to have an affinity for attics, though we have lived here for over twenty years without having had one before. Gin Petty, on whose shoulder we’ve been crying has this to say about coons nesting in attics:

As for coons not making nests, I’ll agree with you, TR. They most certainly do, along with messes of other types. When we bought a house in Versailles, one of the first things we did was check the attic. It was a mess. Coons had piled up insulation and staked out potty areas. When I asked a neighbor if he had coon problems, he looked at me like I was from outer space. “We don’t have coons around here. They live out in the country!”

Of course, we are out in the country, so I guess we have no complaint. Now that we’ve lost the battle, I hope I’ll be able to get some sleep. At least until the babies are up and around. The same websites that assured TR that talk radio and ammonia would run the raccoon off assure us that mother and babies will move on in a few weeks. Unless, of course, this is Ursula…

Meanwhile, I’ll take comfort from my conversation with Leatha Kendrick at the KyWWC. When I introduced Leatha to Cathy Essinger, I mentioned that Leatha’s father was a veterinarian and Leatha began to talk about all the animals they had rescued and lived with when she was a child. Among them was a raccoon who made a nest in the sofa and used to climb her mother’s legs. “My mother was a very tolerant woman,” said Leatha. For myself, I hope I don’t have to have my tolerance tested much further.

from “Translating Daddy”

Whistling ministrant to wounds,
you bent above the morphine doze of each cat tied
spread-eagle on the steel, her belly shaved. While
your hands moved across the void, the empty eyes of animal sleep,
she lay limp as my loose-stuffed toys, but breathing, bleeding.
Father, you let us in that sterile room
and spoke the tongue we’d come to understand:
“scalpel” “scissors” (we knew which one when) “sponge”
Two girls, eight and ten, we drank our colas,
orange crush, crunching peanuts,
casually taking in your knife’s precise incision,
the hairline beads of red that spread into a gaping
mouth you entered with two fingertips.
…
Father, we knew you were a savior,
healer of illnesses your patients had no language
to describe. Work took you up.
Something happened through you—
we watched it carefully as we had learned to hold
your words, sheathed and definite as blades.

–Leatha Kendrick, Heart Cake (The Sow’s Ear Press, 2000)