“I’ll be out with the dog!”
Shouted from the bottom of the stairs, she knows I just need to go.
Stan went fishing, because he could not take in what had happened. (Stan Went Fishing)
And so it is in real time, I cannot take it in, all these things people say, things I should do, and things I should not do, and the things they think are worth doing.
And so it is I find myself on the roadside with Lacey. Path, sidewalk, edge of grass, raccoon tail and remnant of spinal cord, muddy patch with slippery layer of leaves. We watch the ground as it comes toward us and then is gone under our feet, my two, her four, me trudging, her trotting, the walking meditation.
Step, step, step, look, look, look. I am not the sum total of my “what’s going on” in my head. Out here is where it is happening. Breathe, green, blue, light, sound. And be, just be, now and now and now.
The raccoon died over the winter. Its body lay there near the place the sidewalk ends on Kuykendall, just before the gravel driveway where the split rail fence starts at the entrance to Providence Forest. At first I wondered how it died. Hit by a car? But so far from the road…maybe dragged by animals or vultures. We just avoided it for the first few weeks, as I kept Lacey from sniffing the carcass. No one moved it, although I kept thinking a mysterious someone who comes and takes care of such things would inevitably arrive and make it nice again, not stay there, a shocking reminder of mortality.
But the months passed as we watched the process of decay, dust to dust. The unmistakably markings did not fade, the striped tail, and masked head, even as the body disintegrated into the dirt and leaves at the edge of the hedge, near the tall gray wooden board fence.
Now when we went that way, which was not every day, my body flinched as we came around that corner, remembering the death we wanted to avoid seeing, yet I always looked, thought I wouldn’t but couldn’t help it.
During the winter the skin began to wear away, and now the snout was in the air, the skeletal remains of a mouth, open as if making a last cry. Now I started thinking about the actual death of the animal. Did it suffer? Did it have a chance to survive some injury but just didn’t make it? Did any other raccoons try to help it? Does it work that way in the wild animal world? The image of that raccoon mouth, just the bones, comes back into my brain…the cry of us all, for life.
Yesterday I looked again, and in the drizzling rain I could see the raccoon tail, the kind I first saw on Davy Crockett’s hat, and next to it a section of vertebrae, less than a foot long, still lying on the ground where the raccoon died. The whole process of life and death, there in the dirt next to the sidewalk. I could feel it, my own mortality, peeking over my shoulder.
It happens to us all. I will be a remnant, a section of bones, without such a distinctive marker as a raccoon tail, to leave behind in the world.
I cannot take in all that happens. It gets in through the world. And so I must go out into the world, so it can get through to me.