Outside The Box

As we recoil from the unrelenting drama of world news and weather, we turn now to the renewable resource of wisdom and entertainment provided by the creatures with whom we share this world. We don’t have to look far. Dogs teach us unconditional love. Cats show us how to stay limber. Snakes remind us not to wear flip-flops in the garden.

No one has learned more from our neighbors great and small than my beautiful Tracey. When a copperhead slithered across her bare toes, right then and there she learned to buck dance. I’ve seen Riverdance and the Georgia Mountain Cloggers, but they play second fiddle to her performance on that day.

We’ve shared some of the woodland wisdom provided by our little sanctuary at the edge of the wilderness. Dogs and cats, squirrels and raccoons, bears and bunnies, and birds of all feathers have contributed. But the teachings of the humble opossum may take some time to understand. Our shallow ideals of beauty often do not embrace their kind. Many of us have only a peripheral awareness of possums as a sort of macabre road decoration, unaware of their benefits to the ecosystem and, occasionally, to our good humor.

Tracey’s appreciation of Didelphis virginiana was a long time coming. Her journey to awareness began with a particularly handsome and well‑fed furball who dined on the leftover cat food the barn cats left on the washstand outside a back window. In my opinion, Puffy the Possum was performing a service by cleaning up the leftovers and removing any unintended support for the mouse population—and temptation for the bear. But Tracey considered him vermin, and when his eyes would shine through the window at night while he watched TV with us, she would throw open the back door and loudly frighten him away.

Tracey’s disdain for Puffy was shared by her little Shih Tzu warrior companion, Barkley J. Poopenhouser. Barkley made it his mission in life to track and harass Puffy whenever and wherever possible. It was a sad day for Puffy when curiosity overrode discretion and he allowed Barkley to trap him in an empty garbage can on the carport.

Barkley and Tracey celebrated Puffy’s capture and taunted him in his captivity. She praised Barkley as a defender of the realm, and I won’t repeat the rude things she said about Puffy. Against my better judgment, she insisted that we relocate him to someplace far from his home and away from the cat food.

With Puffy still confined in the garbage can, we drove to a remote location where a dilapidated old barn bordered Forest Service land—an ideal shelter and hunting ground for a displaced possum. I brought out the garbage can and gently tipped it over at the edge of the woods. Puffy didn’t run, but his head hung low as he slowly trudged toward the trees, leaving behind a life of leisure. I don’t know if possums cry, but grief was written on his features as he considered a future without a ready supply of cat food and without any television to watch through the window at night.

As Puffy began to disappear into the undergrowth, Tracey couldn’t resist a parting insult aimed in his direction. At that very moment, something extraordinary happened. When he heard Tracey’s voice, Puffy froze. And slowly he turned, overwhelmed by grief and resentment. Then he charged.

Puffy streaked by me and made a beeline for Tracey, and the noise he made—a combination of hiss, snarl, and growl—was shockingly intense. I did not know that possums could run that fast. I did not know that Tracey could jump that high.
In the blink of an eye, Tracey was on the hood of the SUV and Puffy was headed toward the woods again, trotting this time and with a look of smug satisfaction. I hope he fared well in his new home.

Tracey’s tender heart finally came to embrace possum‑kind. On one occasion she even rescued a baby from a drainpipe it was stuck in. She learned that a single possum can destroy over 5,000 ticks in a season. They are meticulous groomers, not unlike cats, and in spite of their beneficial work as nature’s sanitation engineers, they are low‑risk when it comes to disease—unlike those possums on the half‑shell, the armadillos. Possums contribute to garden pest control, eating slugs and snails, beetles, venomous insects, and, being partially immune to venom, the occasional small snake.

Unlike Barkley J., Peaches does not hate possums, but she believes they exist for her entertainment. At night she will circle the barn at high speed attempting to catch the possum that cleans up after the chickens. When she catches it, the possum sulls and plays dead, and Peaches gently lays it on the ground and waits for a moment for it to get up and resume the chase. When that doesn’t happen, she abandons the game and continues on her rounds. Our current first‑year sanitation engineer has been caught at least four times, but she continues to perform her nightly duties.

Sadly, the lifespan of a possum is short. Most don’t last more than a year and a half, but some of our clan have lived upwards of three years on a diet of bugs and leftover scratch feed. Possums have many predators, but humans are their main threat. There is a subclass of human that derives a perverse pleasure from running over small creatures trying to cross the road. I’ve seen drivers swerve to hit a possum or a squirrel on more than one occasion. I believe God saw that too.

We return you now to your regularly scheduled program—but perhaps not. Turn off the TV. Close the laptop. Put the phone on the charger. The abuse of these items is a detriment to our curiosity and our ability to appreciate the richness of detail in the world around us. But don’t despair. That ability is not dead. It’s just playing possum.