We have woodchucks.

I see them everywhere lately, rootling around in the the grass. It must be some sort of seven-year cycle or something. On Tuesday, driving home down a busy stretch alongside a vast trainyard in our utterly urban part of town, I counted four groundhogs (one on his hindlegs looking like an upended meatloaf), as well as a coal-black squirrel, a bunny, and a dead mallard in the grassy boulevard (the only casualty).

I was especially excited by this commute/commune with nature because we’d suffered such a long brittle winter, and because, frankly, I find these things exciting.

There really isn’t anyone in my daily circle who reaches the same level of enthusiasm as I do for this sort of thing. The English guy in the office next to me — if I shout at him — will peer out his window at a circling falcon and make noises like he’s impressed, but I can tell he’s being polite and would rather talk about rugby.

The only other real nature guy in my immediate vicinity is Steve, the one who helped me chase an orphaned nighthawk around the parking lot last summer. He’s the same guy who gives me venison sausages in the fall. Which means he likes to look at wild animals and . . . you know . . . then he likes to shoot them. Some of them, if they’re in season . . . mostly. But, day to day, he’s all I’ve got, so I’ve cultivated a friendship that includes pretending to look at the dead deer photos and NRA emails he forwards to me.

I had a real birder in my life once. And a catter and dogger. Someone equally fascinated by blue jays, and genetics, and British comedies, and gravestones, and small towns, and smoking, and architecture, and road trips, and religion and politics, and Magritte, and Walker Percy, and Tom Jones twenty years ago, oh, and the Civil War, and a good fried ribeye or a baked custard. All the odds and ends of things that caught our eye or captured her attention and mine for a day or a decade. She would have gladly joined me in wondering about those woodchucks/groundhogs — why they’re all up and down Pierce Butler Road, why you never see two of them close together, what it is they eat to get so sleek and beaverish.

She also happened to be the one most minutely interested in kids, in my kids, with a passion second only to mine and clearly better than mine in some ways. The one with the patience to spend hours playing kid games and laughing at kid jokes. The one who found conversation as easy as breathing and who could get my cranky teenager to smile  . . . or cry . . . like he was five years old again.

The one who was interested in me just because I was hers.

She’s gone, my birder, with all the things she was and all the things I must now find piecemeal or not at all in the world.

I miss you, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day.

Tweet  Print This Post

Tags: advice, family & parenting // Add Comment »