Speaking of wild animals . . .

A couple of weeks ago I woke out of dead sleep around midnight. Everything was silent -- no babies crying -- and my brain flailed around for a moment trying to figure out why it was awake. Then I heard a whining, yipping cry -- dying rabbit combined with wild dog -- right under my bedroom window. It was answered, and answered again, and again. A weird chorus. "Dane, do you hear the coyotes?" I asked. "Yes, I'm listening to them." I could tell that he was smiling in the dark.

Wildlife biologists believe that eastern coyotes have interbred with red wolves. They are bigger, fluffier, and have a different skull structure than their western counterparts. Two days before Dane and I were woken up by their midnight yodeling, I saw a big coyote cross our front orchard in broad daylight, pushing his way through chest-deep snow. My first thought was, "That's the most enormous fox I've ever seen!" Followed quickly by, "No, that's the reddest wolf I've ever seen." I was yelling for Dane to come downstairs and hurling myself through the door to the sun room before my conscious brain sorted it all the way out. Duncan and Tristan, oblivious to the excitement, went on eating whole wheat penne. Still, it was a breath-holding I-can't-believe-I-get-to-see-this moment.

But not a rare moment for us these days. We're perched on the mountainside in a house full of windows. If you are in our house very long you will inevitably hear one of us calling from another room, "Come and see this quick! QUICK!!!" We call it deer-TV, possum-TV, coyote-TV, or cardinal-TV depending on what animals we happen to be watching. Sometimes we scramble to get each other and the babies all looking out the same window. Sometimes Duncan or Tristan or a cat will call our attention to a show that we never noticed. Sometimes the show is a lot closer than "TV"; a deer three feet from the nursery window can cause a serious disruption in a diaper change. Sometimes there is no hope of getting other people to the window in time, and one lucky person watches alone. I am dying to see bobcat-TV and bear-TV myself.

We are fairly swarmed with wildlife here. I took a fifteen-minute walk last week and saw possum tracks, deer tracks, turkey tracks, and bobcat tracks. Our apple trees have bear-damage. When we walk around the orchards we watch the ground the way you would in a cow pasture. It turns out that bear-patties are . . . aromatic . . . when they're tracked into the house.

And all of this, even the bear droppings, is one of the powerfully good aspects of our lives since we left California. When we got here, we were a little traumatized. In less than two years, we had moved across the country twice, changed both our jobs twice, had two children, spent two months in hospitals. Dane lost his grandmother and his uncle. We had been faced with the possibility of our sons being born catastrophically early; we had been faced with the possibility of our five-month-old baby dying or becoming an amputee. And we had also had incredible good fortune. Two healthy babies, growing crawling, babbling, keeping us up all night, all their limbs intact. Our world had changed, fundamentally and repeatedly. Sitting in our empty house -- our boxes not even here yet -- we were wrecked, exhausted, reeling to catch up.

But at least we had deer-TV.

At the end of October I wrote this:

People have been asking us if we’ve settled in since the day we arrived. After two months here, I can finally say that we are beginning to settle in and recover a little. The creaking and popping of the house as it warms in the sun; the changing glow of the ceiling beams from sunrise, to noon, to sunset, to moon rise; the tiny thumps and thuds of bugs, golden motes colliding with the southern windows; the weight of apples on the trees; the smell of apples in the heat; the endless slow circling of the buzzards catching thermals; the skudding rush of clouds over the cusp of the mountain; the quiet patter of leaf-fall in the still woods; the mountains sleeping like great animals under the evening sky, their deciduous fur blue in the shadows, purple where the uplands catch the light; the glint of a pond a-way down in the valley reflecting Maxfield Parrish clouds; all these things have helped.

The season has changed, the animals have changed, but all these things continue to help. And so, I'll stop here and promise to the write again soon about: Sigh Language! Talking! The discovery of belly buttons! And nostrils!

Happy Groundhog Day to you all. :-)