Groundhog
The groundhog did hundreds in damage before I got fed up and bought a trap to rehome it. But after taking to Facebook to ask whether melon outperformed apple as bait, a group of concerned citizens drowned out my question with a remonstrative chorus of how rehoming the rodent was an act of colonialism.
Displacing the groundhog would guarantee its demise, I was warned. Released within two acres of an already-established groundhog, it would be forced to fight for territory or starve. Wasn’t the land behind my house its rightful home, as much as it was mine? Did I want the blood of an innocent animal on my hands?
I did not.
So, I did nothing.
The groundhog dug labyrinthine tunnels under my shed, displacing a foundation of crushed stone and growing fat on my gardens. I pushed chicken wire into the ground; it dug under it. I bought a gallon of coyote piss and sprinkled it around the garden beds, rolled a smoke bomb into its burrow, but nothing worked.
Frustrated by the amount of destruction it had caused in under a month, I messaged a guy I knew from Instagram, who was always posting about returning to his ancestral roots and food sovereignty. I’d seen pictures of him enjoying groundhog tacos, so I wrote to see if he’d like some more. He was in, he replied, and he would be there to harvest the groundhog as soon as I was ready.
An hour later, he pulled into my driveway and from the backseat of his car slid a long metal spear. The groundhog was trapped, so things would be easy, he assured. But up close, I noticed his spear was actually a picket salvaged from an old wrought iron gate. Is that gonna work? I asked, brows raised.
The tip is dull, he admitted, but I can’t discharge a firearm within city limits.
Thirty agonizing minutes later, when the groundhog finally stopped moving, I walked him back to his car. Tossing the body to the pavement, he leaned into the backseat of his car to grab a plastic bag when the groundhog lifted its head from the pavement and attempted to drag itself away.
Dude! I yelled, jumping backwards. What the fuck?!
I can’t believe this thing isn’t dead yet, he muttered, grabbing a mallet from the back seat of his car.
*
Weeks later, when bloody incisors continued to gnaw at my sleep, I wrote to He Who Carries A Dull Spear.
I feel horrible about how much the groundhog suffered, I wrote. I should have spoken up and I didn’t, so I’m writing to see if there’s a better way to harvest future groundhogs?
His answer was curt. He recommended I consider what the groundhog’s death might have looked like had white men not extirpated native rattlesnakes and wolves. Consider what it would have looked like had the groundhog been slowly poisoned, or ripped to shreds by a pack of dogs. The animal had not been caged and pumped full of chemicals to make it fit for consumption in an “enslaved environment” - instead, it had lived a natural life and died a natural death at the hand of a natural predator.
Attached to his message were photos of dark purple meat, vacuum-sealed, stacked neatly in a mini fridge.
Sharpen your spear? I suggested, then snoozed him for 30 days.
*
Where do mansplainers get their water?
From a well, actually…
*
I smudge every corner of my house, then smudge my yard. Though I’ve been told sage is not for white ladies, it’s the only thing that helps.
*
On a Facebook gardening group, one guy suggests a .22 for dealing with groundhogs, and a few members call for him to be removed.
This is a GARDENING group! they admonish.
I am a gardener, he responds.
He is removed.
*
Apparently, groundhogs are a pain in the ass for many people.
On a different Facebook gardening group, a woman suggests using a live trap to move the critter, and encourages mindfulness around relocation in order to avoid making the groundhog another gardener’s problem.
Someone in the group calls her a Zionist, and three people like it.
*
Everyone is talking about Palestine.
Everyone is talking about Israel.
Everyone is talking about Palestine and Israel.
One dismembered baby is not the same as eight babies dead to starvation!
While there is no evidence of dismembered babies, there is no question that women, including pregnant women, were raped and beheaded.
It was not a terrorist attack and it was not an antisemitic attack. It was an attack against Israelis.
It’s war.
It’s genocide.
While everyone is distracted by Gaza, drag queens and libtards are invading our public schools and telling boys they have vaginas.
You’re grimacing, my husband observes.
I shut my computer and crack a beer.
*
I come across this paragraph in a book by Patricia Lockwood, published in 2021: There was a new toy. Everyone was making fun of it, but then it was said to be designed for autistic people, and then no one made fun of it anymore, but made fun of the people who were making fun of it previously. Then someone else discovered a stone version from a million years ago in some museum, and this seemed to prove something. Then the origin of the toy was revealed to have something to do with Israel and Palestine, and so everyone made a pact never to speak of it again. And all of this happened in the space of like four days.
*
At the nursery, I spot a beautiful Wandering Jew. A sign below it states that its name has been changed to Wandering Dude.
The name Wandering Jew is antisemitic, the sign says, since it references the Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to Crucifixion, cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming.
I take the plant from its hanger to examine its purple striped leaves, looking closely for spider mites and scars. To avoid any trouble, I’ll just call it Lebowski.
*
Beautiful Wandering Jew! my Jewish friend says, pointing to my new plant.
Actually, it’s Lebowski, I flinch, explaining the name change.
Fuck that nonsense, she says, rolling her eyes. It’s part our heritage, not having a home!
*
On Facebook, a friend posts: Aaron Bushnell is a hero.
Aaron Bushnell was the 25-year-old serviceman of the US Air Force who doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy, shouting “Free Palestine!” while burning alive.
I ask, Did you watch the video?
No, he writes back. Too traumatizing.
*
I’m stuffing a tangle of bittersweet into a blazing fire when I see him, shuffling out from under my neighbor’s shed, dazed and mangy. After a long pause, he stands on his hind legs and sniffs the air.
Fuck!
The sound of my voice sends him scrambling back to safety.
*
When your friends do not worship your personal gods - Bjork, orbweavers, cowboy boots - calling them an infidel is funny, or not right now?
*
Occasionally, the marm who lives in the unheated schoolhouse of my solar plexus scolds me, her voice thick with dust: Think it’s time for jokes, while the planet floods and burns? While cities are razed and little children plowed into graves? While homeless men take heroin and horse tranquilizer only a mile from your daughter’s school?
I’m telling a friend about my inner schoolmarm, how she can pop up and instantly ruin the fun.
You’re supposed to say unhoused, not homeless, she says, exhaling her vape in my face.
*
I read in an editorial: Using words other than “suicide” to describe Aaron Bushnell’s death strikes me as reminiscent of how we restrict the meaning of the word “murder” to killing that we believe is unjustified so that we avoid it in the context of war.
*
I listen to a recording of a Hamas fighter telling his parents that he killed ten Jews in a kibbutz near the Gaza border, all by himself.
Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews! Mom, your son is a hero! he boasts.
He tells them he’s calling from the phone of a Jewish woman he’s just killed, encouraging them to check WhatsApp for proof.
I wish I was with you, his mother says.
*
Kunti is a character in the Hindu epic Mahabharata. She is the queen of Kuru, the first wife of King Pandu, and the mother of five sons known as the Pandavas. Kunti is known for saying, When one prefers one’s own children to the children of others, war is near.
*
I’ve set a live trap for the new groundhog.
A woman I met - a farmer - scoffed when I shared my concerns.
How much food will you lose before you grow a pair and get rid of him, she asks, shaking her head. Cantaloupe, she says, a cigarette pressed between her lips, and a friend with a truck because that bastard will piss and shit everywhere.
Her personal method is to angle a wooden plank against a five gallon bucket filled with water, a trail of apple slices leading straight into the swimming pool.
*
Whatever you do, don’t lose your sense of humor, said Jerry Seinfeld in the commencement speech he delivered to Duke graduates.
Protesting his presence, a small group of students walk out.
It’s because he’s Jewish!
No, it’s because he’s a Zionist!
One student is quoted saying they walked out because none of them particularly wanted to listen to Seinfeld.
*
Look at these Ivy elites, embracing oppressed identities, wearing keffiyehs and pitching Patagonia tents on manicured lawns to protest a war they are incapable of understanding after a life in the suburbs, a mustachioed Vietnam vet posts.
The word tentifada is claimed by both sides.
*
The groundhog is gone, relocated to a 20-acre field of clover. It’s public land, so we’ve broken the law, but some rules are worth bending.
Settler-colonialist, I called my husband, who put on a pair of thick leather gloves before opening the trap to release it. The groundhog’s ass, grown fat on my veggies, wobbled as it disappeared into lush grass.
That’s not an actual term, he said, peeling off his gloves before tossing them in the backseat of the truck.
Infidel, I said, laying on the gas and speeding away before someone caught us.
*
I read: Just War Theorists believe that war cannot be ethically waged without having reasonable prospects for success. The logic is intuitive: War inevitably involves a lot of killing, and killing can only be justified if it accomplishes a greater good. If the objective behind the killing is impossible (or extremely implausible), then there is no greater good to be won from the bloodshed.
*
Scorched earth, I read. Humanitarian nightmare. Children burned alive.
*
Students on a college campus tear down posters of Jewish children held hostage by Hamas.
Go back to Poland! a young man shrieks, his face hidden behind a mask, when a handful of students resist the removal of the posters.
Some students shrink away in horror.
Others call it decolonization.
*
A Columbia student writes to his professor: I think [the protests] do speak to a certain failing on Columbia’s part, but it’s a failing that’s much more widespread and further upstream. That is, I think universities have essentially stopped minding the store, stopped engaging in any kind of debate or even conversation with the ideologies which have slowly crept into every bit of university life, without enough people of good conscience brave enough to question all the orthodoxies. So if you come to Columbia believing in “decolonization” or what have you, it’s genuinely not clear to me that you will ever have to reflect on this belief. And after all this, one day the university wakes up to these protests, panics under scrutiny, and calls the cops on students who are practicing exactly what they’ve been taught to do from the second they walked through those gates as freshmen.
*
A Tweet with seven million views: A good law of history is that if you ever find yourself opposing a student movement while siding with the ruling class, you are wrong. Every single time. In every era. No matter the issue.
I wonder if this is true. Do student activists historically have some sort of unique claim to moral authority?
I spend the next day digging.
No, it is not true. What it is, is complicated.
*
I read an article about Mao Zedong’s Red Guards, the National Socialist German Student League, and the students who helped Khomeini come to power.
*
Many parents see the footage of the Palestinian father frantically searching the rubble for his children. They feel the grip of his horror and hold their kids close, sick with understanding.
Then the grind calls - the bus pulls up, the timer dings, the toddler shrieks - and everyone moves on.
*
In an article, Palestinian human rights activist Mahmoud Mushtaha reflects on how the recent surge of conflict has made his work impossible: I’m constantly engaged in conversations about coexistence and reconciliation. But Israel’s actions against Palestinians consistently undermine what I am advocating. How can I convince a child who has lost every member of their family to accept the killer as a neighbor?
In a live interview, I hear an Israeli peace activist say the same thing, but about Israeli trauma at the hands of Hamas.
*
A man in a naturalist group on Facebook posts a drone-recorded video of an eaglet pecking at the head of another eaglet until it dies.
VIOLENT, one woman writes, ENOUGH!
Apologies, writes the videographer, I was under the impression this group was okay with the nature of Nature.
*
A poem, by Wislawa Szymborska, titled The End and the Beginning.
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.
Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.
We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.
Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.
From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.
Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.
*
‘From the river to the sea’ must be judged only by what the speaker says is in their heart.
I hear a man on public radio say this and wonder if the preposterous logic of this statement might be used on my husband.
I meant what was in my heart, I’ll tell him, but you heard what flew from my mouth.
*
One argument is that it is impossible for the oppressed to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an oppressor to be the subject of racism.
One argument is that you should never assume the weak are “just” simply because they are weak, or the strong “wrong” because they are strong.
*
On a Facebook gardening group, people fight about the importance of differentiating the word invasive from the word aggressive.
Invasive is correct if the plant is out of control and killing everything, but it's not native. Aggressive is correct if the plant is out of control and killing everything, but it's native.
*
I wake suddenly from sleep, heart racing. Where did all the Ukrainian flags go?
*
Not enough of life makes sense for you to be able to survive without humor, said Jerry Seinfeld to the Duke graduates. Humor is the most survival-essential quality you will ever need to navigate the human experience.
In front of him, silently, unfolds the Palestinian flag.
*
A poem titled “Making a Fist” by Naomi Shihab Nye.
We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
—Jorge Luis Borges
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
“How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”
Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.
*
I cannot share this, I tell my husband, listing friends who will cancel me.
Why would they cancel you, he asks.
Because you’re not supposed to feel conflicted, I snap, heading outside to burn.
*
I read this, in the book by Patricia Lockwood: Go not far enough, and find yourself guilty of complacency, complicity, a political slumping into the cushions of your time. Go too far, and find yourself saying that you didn't care that a white child had been eaten by an alligator.
*
In the fall of 2023, my hometown was brought to its knees by a mass shooting that killed eighteen people in under fifteen minutes. It was the tenth-deadliest shooting in U.S. history.
While law enforcement searched for the shooter, the city froze, suspended in terror. Blinds were drawn and doors were locked. Victim counts changed by the hour, and over social media, rumor outpaced fact. Parents did their best to keep young children distracted, performing melodramatic readings of silly books and telling jokes.
More! the kids begged, delighted by all of this attention. More!
*
The manhunt lasted two days until the shooter was found dead by suicide in a tractor-trailer.
We began to breathe, just enough to feel our bodies, which no longer felt like our own.
*
Two months after the mass shooting, a local woman trying to boost morale decided to move forward with a holiday event she hosted every December. Local downtown businesses would open their doors for an afternoon of holiday shopping, just as they had done in previous years. After two months of unspeakable heartache, a little warmth seemed it could go a long way. There’d be hot chocolate and handmade crafts, Christmas carols and cheese boards. Struggling business owners desperate for connection and customers began advertising for the event, and excitement built hesitantly, then steadily.
On the same day of the event, a group of 50 pro-Palestine protesters gathered downtown to voice their disgust with a local congressman. The congressman had voted in a way that made him complicit in the murder of thousands of Palestinians, yelled a woman into a bullhorn. Women and children! Blood in the streets! Protestors responded to her calls, shrieking “MURDER!” Child-sized caskets covered in white sheets stained with fake blood were set out on the sidewalk. One man held a sign suggesting the congressman should be jailed for his vote.
Some local residents who came out for the holiday event froze at the sight of the bloody caskets. Some stepping out of their cars heard “MURDER” reverberating off of buildings and drove directly home.
At some point, a local florist asked protestors to move up the street a few feet, so customers could better access her front entrance. They refused. The woman running the holiday event asked, too, assuring them that this was not a request to disband, just to better share the street. They refused.
After two hours, the protestors moved on, and the holiday event sputtered to an early close.
It’s not like they shut down a weapons manufacturer, the woman who organized the holiday event said, tears streaming down her face. She’d participated in plenty of protests, but was convinced this one wouldn’t help anything. A friend embraced her before she plopped into a plastic chair and sobbed into her hands.
Later that evening, curious to know more about who organized the protest, I found the public invite on Instagram, aptly named “Shut It Down for Palestine.” In addition to the time and place, the invite included a reminder to be respectful of the unhoused people the protestors would see on the street.
*
They achieved exactly what they were there to do, a woman commented on Facebook, in response to whether the timing and intensity of the protest was tone deaf. The city was still struggling to grieve stolen lives, including a 14 year old boy and his father who were out for a night of bowling.
Make them uncomfortable, she wrote, and hit those complacent business owners’ right in the pocketbook.
*
My questions trip over themselves, wriggling stupidly on the floor.
*
I had a friend who died by self-immolation.
A month prior to his death, and after a gradual erosion of mental health, he called me in the middle of the night and left a belligerent voicemail. I listened to the message, took two deep breaths, and deleted it from my phone.
My friend was Black, queer, and cuttingly clever. The last time I’d seen him, he’d stepped off a bus wearing a pink denim skirt, his bare shoulders glistening with coconut oil. He picked me up, swung me in a circle, then left a slick of cherry lip gloss on my cheek.
My friend also happened to be a Christian missionary who’d been tortured in a prison camp for ten months after crossing into North Korea to protest the inhumane treatment of children.
Our twenty year friendship - before and after Jimmy Carter secured his release from North Korea - included day-long adventures, open-mouthed laughter, bitchy fights, and ripping off our shirts on the dance floor. Sometimes, in the purple hours of the evening, he’d close his eyes and deliver messages from my ancestors. Once, he offered my entire family foot massages.
In the last few months of his life, I’d grown scared of his increasing aggression, and I was pissed that he’d refused all attempts at help. I was a new mom trying to figure out how to stay sane in the face of new responsibilities and scant sleep. Not responding to his voicemail was an act of self-preservation, I decided. Radical self-care.
Soon after leaving me the voicemail, he walked into an open field in San Diego and struck a match.
*
There are no words for the smell, a witness cried in an interview after Bushnell’s suicide, his face the color of wood ash.
*
When my 6th grade daughter came home from school and sat down to a snack I’d made for her - a bowl of yogurt and three huge strawberries - she reported that one of her teachers hates strawberries.
She hates them, she said, her teeth pink with juice, Even the smell!
She’s probably allergic, I offered.
Nope, she said, stuffing another one into her mouth. She’d asked.
She even asked if her teacher had past trauma with a strawberry.
*
Animal Speak is a book about identifying and understanding animal totems, gifted to me by a Mi’kmaq man who laughed when I asked if I had any business exploring such a thing. White people talking about their spirit animals pisses people off, I explained.
He threw his head back and laughed so loud people turned their heads to stare.
Humans have found meaning in animals for all of time, he said, shaking his head. To think otherwise is ridiculous. But if you’re gonna be precious, call it your ASS.
Animal of Special Significance.
*
20 years ago, my friend, Terrence, told me his spirit animal was a hamburger.
One thing I’ve stolen is that joke.
*
The author of Animal Speak is Ted Andrews, a white man born in Dayton, Ohio, who devoted his life to the spiritual arts. Though Animal Speak received criticism for being “typical white shamanism,” 500,000 copies were sold in five years. In an Adirondack chair, feet by the fire, I flip to the section on groundhogs.
Groundhogs go into hibernation and spend about four to six months in that condition. They prepare for this by fattening themselves. They gorge through summer and late fall. Their temperature will drop from its normal 96 degrees to about 40 degrees, barely above freezing. They achieve a state of unconsciousness and will usually awaken in early spring. When groundhog shows up as a totem, lessons associated with death and dying and revelations about its process will begin to surface. Its medicine is that of going into the great unconscious to touch the mystery of death without dying.
*
My ASS is a groundhog, teehee.
*
A maple in my backyard is down to American bittersweet, which vined up the length of the trunk and choked it out.
American bittersweet is native, while Asiatic is not, though both like to strangle trees.
*
I’ve entered the secondary burn, I tell my husband, pouring myself a glass of water before heading back outside.
What’s that? he asks, peering over his laptop.
When a fire gets so hot, it consumes the smoke as fuel.
Like armchair politics, he says, chuckling at his own joke.
*
I’ve lost the secondary burn. Smoke billows across the yard in choking gray sheets.
Reaching into a brush pile for kindling, there’s movement in my periphery, then a high-pitched whistle before the groundhog bolts from the pile, heading for my feet, her black eyes shining. Stepping to the side, my shoe catches the edge of a canvas tub and sends me to the ground.
From this perspective, I can see two small heads peering from the hole she’s running for, and before I can get back on my feet, she and her pups disappear into their burrow.
*
TIME TO BURN IT TO THE MOTHERFUCKING GROUND.
A sensation of heat pricks at my neck. My breath goes funny, ragged.
Tears well and I rub them away.
But they come back.
*
Once the panic attack dumps me back on the ground and my breathing slows, my vision widens from pinprick to panorama. There’s an emerald canopy of oak above my head, sunlight glittering through the spaces between the leaves. Shapes of light are cast across my limbs, disappearing and reappearing in the breeze. My jaw lets go and hangs open.
I must look like a doofus, staring into the tree tops with my mouth slung open, but it feels too good to shut.
*
I don’t know is an enormously disorienting thing to say.
*
It’s quiet in my yard but for the occasional sough of wind through white oak.
Cautiously, they step from the burrow, heading for my flower beds.