All Kinds of Essays Including The Unfinished Marsupial
The opossum is the only marsupial in North America. Apparently its relatives did not manage to displace the North American placental mammals in the Great American Interchange.
This is was far as I’d come in the third essay in my animal/creature series. Two sentences. Overthinking.com hashtag overthinking enters the chat.
“easily grow your audience with images of taxidermied platypus,” encouraged the online brochure
Their little possum hands look like something out of a really creative stop-motion animated film.
I have never noticed the little hands of the opossum, each foot looks like a very well-made and shaped pale baby doll hand. All those years of possum in the backyard and the babies hanging on for dear life, and I never noticed or thought about how strong those little feet must be, strong and nimble for balancing and holding on for dear life when your mother takes you along the back fence where the dog barks, that is the danger of letting go in Los Angeles.
I saw one in my little backyard in Los Angeles at twilight last year and watched her walk the last few feet of the back fence with her tail stuck out straight as a pin, pink and bald, and her body covered in brown and white fur, with the white fur underneath, so that her coat was prettier than you expect for a possum. I watched her soft, narrow white face, with two small, dark ears.
When she paused crossing the back wall of the backyard, her mouth was slightly open, held that way, like a sick animal, panting, but her coat was thick and she waddled across the narrow back wall, her tail stuck straight out behind her and a little pad of fat curled over the top of the base of the tail. Her legs were dark gray like her ears, and if it weren’t for the bald tail, which wasn’t completely bald, she looked like a little bear with a sharp face. And maybe a slight head cold. Mouth breathing, so to speak, but very graceful and good if you have rats, apparently, but let’s not think about that.
2023 Temescal Canyon
When I run workshops the first thing we talk about is how to be a respectful participant, meaning you don’t tell other people what you think they ought to do with their art, instead you tell the author what speaks to you, what confuses you, what you liked and why. As a workshop participant your feedback as a reader is important and that’s one of the reasons why I like participating and running workshops. I will say after teaching a few workshops during the pandemic that online is not a bad venue at all for this kind of discussion.
