Sherry Chandler

It’s been a whet since I did an Ursula update. She has five cubs this year and has become so hungry/tame/desperate that she comes out in the daytime to beg. I will be hanging clothes on the line and there will be Ursula, just looking at me. Saturday I emptied a half-drunk bottle of pop on the grass and a few minutes later looked out the kitchen window to see Ursula paddling in the sweet, licking her paws.

She has also got hungry/tame/desperate enough to let me sit about ten feet away and take pictures. The light was bad, though, and she was not posing. The one above was most fun, since it caught her at the task of washing her dog food. It’s hard to keep the water fresh.

We have also noticed at least two smaller, darker raccoons coming to the feeding station. These we infer are last year’s litter.

We put the “empty” catfood cans out for the raccoons to lick, figuring otherwise they’ll just steal them from the garbage. My son said he went out yesterday, when he was the only one home and all was quiet, to find all five cubs playing around the feeding station with mama. When they spotted him, they all ran for cover lickety-split, except for one who had his head stuck in a catfood can. He was close enough to hear the “pop” when the can came off the head and then that cub was gone, too.

I guess we’re gonna have to re-write that of Jeff Foxworthy joke: you might be a redneck if your back porch collapses and kills more than five raccoons.

First Tools

With a candleflame
I could create a holy place
a glowy breath to read by
to toast some bread
to guard me
from the hounds of night.

But all I’m given is a spark—
no, not even that.
Just two sharp stones—
one to hold
one to strike with—
and a craving for light.

—Mary E. O’Dell

Originally published in Wind, Fall 1998. Reproduced here by permission of the author.