Where the Semi-Wilderness Was
We were one of the first subdivisions in newly developed farmland so our circle backed right up into the woods and we all had big pie-shaped chunks of land, a couple of acres each, and our dogs ran loose in our woods, and the neighbors’ dogs were locked up in a big old dog run, perfect for two big dogs and the shed was a two-story affair with an old Western saddle hung up on the banner for the ladder stairs that led to where they ended up keeping goats. There were a lot of grayish little field mice in that barn.
There were a lot of mice in the fields, too, and they knew the cold like we did, and made dense, warm nests out of every single insulating material they could find. We knew mice can fit through a crack in the door no bigger than a dime. And mice would get in the cushions of our great aunt’s living room furniture with its stiff springs that must have made a nice little cozy home with all the stuffing and horsehair inside the sofa.
As kids with houses backed up to the woods our wild animals were squirrels, chipmunks, blue jays, robins, crows and daddy-long-legs. Sometimes a raccoon, sometimes a garter snake, sometimes a possum.
Once a red fox in the winter cut across the dull brown woods and the white snow and it looked like a bright copper-colored ribbon. We saw lots of mice outside and once I found a mouse at school in the cabinet below the big art studio sink. Groundhogs dug up everybody’s backyards back then. That’s another essay. When I was in junior high school the family next door bought two goats and had them hobbled, and that kept the mowing down in the meadow. Those two kept everything nice and tidy unlike every other creature I knew at that time which was mostly indoor cats and outdoor dogs.
Blue jays woke us up in summer, fireflies blinked for the first half of the night when I was a kid. My mother kept parakeets and said her younger sister put a baby alligator in their tub once and somebody in the family had a tame crow, or maybe I read that in a book somewhere, or somebody else I knew had a little sister with a pet crow before it was illegal, which it is now. Once when I was a kid we found a little bat pressed against the lip of the kitten tiles where the kitchen met the dining room and our uncle caught it, our brave and handsome fishing uncle who took us waterskiing in the sound just west of Long Beach Island, New Jersey.
We grew up with all kind of animals, the wild, the half-domestic, and the tame.
The other animals we knew: cows and horses, but not intimately. We weren’t farmers we just lived in an area where there were a lot of big farms. I knew a horse and a pony that belonged to a friend. Cows were literally everywhere when we first moved into town, every long road was lined with pastures and the big, dark bodies of Black Angus cattle, glossy in the sunshine, some of them.
In middle school (I think) I rode a friend’s palomino and when it turned and walked back to the little barn I hung on to the lintel over the doorway and the horse walked right out from under me. I didn’t have a lot of say with horses back then because I wasn’t particularly confident around them and ponies scared me because everybody said they’re mean, but then I learned later it’s just that they’re really, really smart and remember things.
Which is exactly like crows, which we once fed hotdogs in my old neighborhood (when I was a mom and my kids were little) and I will never forget the side view of one beautiful glossy black bird with half a hot dog dangling from his beak. A little winged elephant of sorts which made me laugh out loud but that bird did not drop that hot dog, either, and flew away perfectly steadily, too.
Before they built the subdivision on the farm there was a pond and some cattle and a black bull who looked mostly tired but we liked to pretend (and I wrote a poem about this somewhere) that given a chance (which we wanted to give him) he’d gore us, but I don’t remember being chased ever. Mostly the tired old creature ignored us.
The fields around our subdivision seemed to grow mostly field corn, a.k.a. dent corn (I didn’t know that) and it’s for livestock. Sweet corn is for humans. My mother planted Silver Queen in the backyard garden and we picked the corn from the cornstalk and ran from the garden gate to the back porch steps where we shucked it and then pulled off all the pretty, damp silk, avoided the corn worms and dropped the shucked ears in the big silver pot my mother had boiling. Every summer for a few years we ate fresh corn and every fall we went to a place that made apple butter and apple cider and probably popcorn, but I might be making that up.
Temescal Canyon, Los Angeles
