Dirt, Rain, and the Raccoon Who Won't Leave

It has been raining for four days straight, the kind of rain that does not have a personality, just steady and gray and persistent, like a houseguest who has stopped trying to charm anyone.

The garden is mostly mud. I went out there this morning in the clogs I keep by the back door, the ones my sister calls "those terrible shoes," which is unkind because they are excellent shoes, they just don't photograph well, and I sank to the second eyelet. I stood there for a while looking at where the kale used to be.

The raccoon (yes, the same one, do not write to me, we are well acquainted) ate the kale starts I planted last weekend. He didn't eat all of them, because that would have been graceful. He ate half. Then he came back two days later and ate three more. Then yesterday he tipped over a small terra cotta pot, presumably to see what I was hiding under it, found that I was not hiding anything under it, and walked away.

The pot is still tipped over. I am not going to right it today. The pot can stay where it is.

I planted the kale again this afternoon. New starts, from the nursery, plus a row of basil that I do not really expect to survive but which I bought because the woman at the register has a granddaughter who is doing chemo and I overheard her telling another customer about it and I needed to give her four dollars, which is what the basil cost, which is how I now own basil.

I do not know what April is like in other places. Here it is mud, and it is rain, and it is the redbud doing that thing it does where it blooms before it has any leaves, like a tree that woke up early and got dressed in the wrong order. The grass is the wrong green, and the wrong green is my favorite green. It only happens for about ten days and then it deepens into a more competent green and you cannot get back to the first one.

I made tea, sat by the window, and watched the rain.

My friend Marian called and said, "What are you doing?"

I said, "Sitting by the window watching the rain."

She said, "But what are you doing."

I said, "I just told you."

She said, "Oh," and then there was a long pause, and then she said, "I think I might come over."

She came over. We did not talk about anything in particular. We watched the rain together for an hour. Then she went home.

The raccoon came back at dusk. I saw him through the window. He stopped at the new kale starts and looked at them, and then he looked, I am being entirely sincere here, directly at the house, at me, through the window.

I raised my mug to him.

He ate one kale start, looked at me again, and ambled off. He left the others.

I think we have an arrangement now. I do not fully understand its terms, and he has not signed anything, and neither have I. But there seems to be an understanding that he will eat one and leave me the rest, provided I do not pretend I am not watching, and provided I do not put another cinderblock on anything.

Tomorrow I am going to plant the basil. It is going to die. But I am going to plant it anyway, because that is the deal you make with April. You plant the things, and the things do what they are going to do, and the rain falls, and the raccoon comes back, and the light gets to that wrong green for a few days, and then it doesn't, and then we keep going.

That is the whole report.