I buried the rat today.
The one that lay belly-up in the yard next to the chicken feeder. I knew it had been skulking around the coop at night. I’d noticed the hole it had carved out with its cunning paws, and I wanted it gone.
And now it is.
But it still gave me a start when I found it. Seeing the bloated belly, covered with the soft fawn colored fur, I felt sad and a little ashamed.
His tiny fists were raised as if to curse me. His yellowed, bucktooth mouth, having tasted the poison, was a rictus of agony.
I grabbed the shovel and moved the body next to the driveway. My husband would bury it later, in the place we lay the dead critters beneath the evergreen tree in the front yard.
This is our marriage: tacit agreements to share the grim tasks. Often in silence. Always with questions.
My job is to transport the corpse closer to the burial site. His job is to dig the hole and do all the rest. I stand by as witness.
I don’t know why we do this, but I’m sure I’ve worked out the better ends of most of our marriage deals. Especially the unsavory ones that involve stink and dirt and bodily mess and even death.
But a few days later I discovered the little carcass was still there – it had dried up and shrunk, flattened down and thin, like a smelly fruit leather.
No kind of resting place.
So I marched inside and interrupted hubby’s Zoom meeting with the slash-across-the-neck gesture and an aggrieved look. He got off the computer pretty quick.
Anyway, I have always been an orderly person, obsessively tidy, sorting and sifting through my surroundings. I seek balance, but I also can’t really thrive without some controlled chaos.
These days, I chase after a clean perfection, an impossible control of my space. I boss everything within earshot, mostly outside in the disobedient yard full of wild and semi-wild critters.
And because my brain’s neurotransmitters are semi-wild too, I work hard, really hard, to adjust myself to the world around me.
The past 2 years have been an experiment in letting the backyard go to seed and allowing the chickens and the bees to free range.
And me?
In the end, I can’t say I’ve really made my peace with the wildness. Some of it is just gross.
The chicken lice, the bulbous egg that gets stuck in the hen’s butt vent, the nasty poop trekking into the house. And the mind numbing repetition – the lock-step sameness of it all.
The prison like routines.
Morning: let the dog out, the chickens out, feed, water, watch for pests and disease. Try remedies for disease and pests. Afternoon: feed, water, watch for trouble. Stimulate the bird brains with treats. Stay on high alert to keep birds cool so we don’t have “broilers”. Evening: lock up biddies, run predator search, confiscate dangerous contraband, eliminate escape routes. Plug in fan for bedtime cooling.
Worry.
And the bee colonies. Feed, treat for parasites, provide fresh water. What to do about hive infestations in the hot tub? What about the swarm?
Often there seems to be more imbalance in this co-existence, and mostly on my end, I’m sure.
And it’s been a challenge to keep this blog going during the COVID time. I guess some people’s art thrives in tough situations, but my writing has not.
Maybe I strive too much for symmetry and beauty. Hosing down the coop and trying to find the inspiration. But I ruminate too much, despair often.
Still I have to say that things are off. I notice the sick little clues. Things aren’t right on the planet.
The stifling heat and strange migration of the songbirds. The manic cicada at my screen door last night, buzzing in drunken spirals at my feet. Just one, blind and lost.
Sometimes I think my bipolarity mirrors the environment – patterns of mood and migration, but random acts and intensity too.
And I feel a kind of vertigo: My view is magnified, but also seen in panorama. A crisis of ecology and my own uneasy conscience.
And I think in annoyingly binary ways; that what I write is okay or chicken poop.
As I grab the old splintery shovel with a death grip and drag it to my tasks. And I caress a newborn rabbit’s tiny ears, the mother torn open and abandoned by the neighbor’s cat.
Day by day, I count off nature’s struggles with my own. And I experience her joy.
Writing has the ability to feel like empowerment and impotence, even in the same paragraph.
Still I know that this is my task – to notice things, to reflect. To sometimes do nothing but stare into the hole while someone else covers up what I don’t want to look at.
To be alert to the flash of cerulean feathers at the nest box.
To hold the question of why an ancient beetle lies in wait to crawl out of the soil only once every 15 years.
To know that most questions never get answers.
Still I try.
To understand these things in the dirt, things dug up and things buried – the necessary, the injured, the bountiful and the simply unlucky. The rich mineral, the insect, the rodent, the perfect pale green egg, the sweet lavender honey, all of the living and all of the dead.
I buried the rat this morning.
Well I discovered it, really.
Dead.
I could only glance at the soft brown bloated belly and yellowed teeth
a rictus of agony,
tiny fisted paws raised to curse me.
The wooden handle of the rusty shovel left a splinter in my hand
as I tipped the metal blade underneath the bush,
letting the small body slip into the shade.
it was heavy but the rat was not.
And then I imagined the dark hole that you would dig later tonight
I wouldn’t look down, but
I would sift the loose soil across the mound with the flat of my hand
and slide it towards yours,
careful not to let the dirt touch the stinging sliver in my palm.
– for William Carlos Williams
–
honeybees & reveries 