Orpheus Descending

This is about a house I once lived in. An elderly lakeside cottage built at the end of the road at the end of the nineteenth century. A summer place for a family who travelled by horse and buggy out from Seattle through deep woods and over steep hills on logging trails. It was wilder there, then, and it is wild there still.

The house sat off the ground on bricks, surrounded by thickets of blackberry bushes and morning-glory vines bent on a struggle to the death. And even though it is only minutes, now, from downtown, squirrels, rabbits, feral pussycats, and “things” I never saw but only heard had long established squatters’ rights on the property. And racoons. We had racoons. Big ones. Several.

            For reasons only known to God and the hormones of racoons, they chose to mate underneath my house. Every spring. And reason known only to God and hormones of racoons, they chose to mate underneath my house at three A.M.

Until you have experienced racoons mating underneath your bedroom at three in the morning, you have missed one of life’s more sensational moments. It is an uncommon event, to say the least. If you’ve ever heard cats fighting in the night, you have a clue. Magnify the volume and intensity by ten. It’s not what you’d call a sensual and erotic sound. More like a three alarm fire is what it is.

            I remember the first time it happened. Since conditions were not really conducive to sleep, I got up. When I say I got up, I mean I GOT UP. About three feet. Straight up. Covers and all.

            When I have recovered my aplomb and adjusted to the new adrenaline level, I got a flashlight and went outside and peered under the house. This lady racoon and her suitor were squared off in a corner, fangs bared, covered with mud and blood, and not looking very sexy at all.

            Neither my presence nor the beam of light could override what drove them on. With snarls and barks and screams, the passionate encounter raged on. While I watched, the matter was finally consummated and resolved. They had no shame. What had to be done was done. And they wandered off, in a kind of glazy-eyed stupor, to groom themselves for whatever might come next in the life of a racoon.

            I sat there in the rain, my light still shinning into the trysting chamber. And I pondered. Why is it that love and life so often have to be carried forth with so much pain and stress and mess? I ask you, why is that?

            I was thinking of my own sweet wife asleep in the bed right above me, and our own noises of conflict mixed with affection. I wondered what the racoons must conclude from the sounds a husband and a wife make at night- the ones that sound like “ If-you-really-loved-me-you-would-not-keep-making-such-a-mess-in-the-bathroom”, followed by “ OH YEAH? WELL LET ME TELL YOU A FEW THINGS. . .”

            Why isn’t love easy?

            I don’t know. And racoons don’t say.

Robert Fulghum

– ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN–