It is 1:30 on a Friday afternoon. I am sitting on my back porch, eating a bite of lunch. To my right, attached to the living room window, is a birdhouse full of baby birds that hatched last weekend. It's hard to tell how many babies are in there. The sun hits the birdhouse this time of day, and I think the babies are hot, because a couple of them have their heads poked out of the nest, and their mouths are open, like they're panting. Or maybe they're just trying to be first in line for the next feeding. Wonder how the parents keep straight on who has eaten and who has not? Do they say, in bird language, "I'll feed Bryan and Margaret. You get Jeff and Nancy."?We have a skunk in the neighborhood. I saw him earlier this week, sauntering down the tree line between us and our neighbor. I guess it's best to just leave him be, and not challenge his territory. A couple of years ago, one was perfuming the neighborhood a couple of times a week, and the elderly folks on the hill concurred that he needed to go. Nanny saw him walking across the bottom one day, and grabbed a shotgun from behind the back door, thrust it into The Husband's hands, and told him to shoot it. But he missed, and missed a couple more times, and every time he'd fire, so would the skunk. The sun was just right, and I could see a puff of mist behind the skunk every time the gun went off. It looked plumb involuntary, like a sneeze or a grunt.
Anyway....
To my left, outside the porch, there is an upside-down Power Wheels Jeep and an upside-down pink Power Wheels Escalade. I turned them over last fall so that they would not get filled up with leaves and such. Now, I hear something thumping under one of them.
I hope it's not the skunk.
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