Groundhog
The groundhog did hundreds of dollars 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 settler colonialism.
Displacing the groundhog would guarantee its harm, I was told. Released within two acres of an already-established groundhog, it would be forced to fight for territory or starve. Was the land behind my house not its rightful home, as much as it was mine? Did I want the blood of an innocent animal on my hands, just so I could be a little more comfortable?
I guessed 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. I sprinkled a gallon of coyote urine around the beds, rolled a smoke bomb into its burrow, blasted Metallica into the entrance hole.
But nothing worked.
Frustrated by the amount of destruction it had caused in only a few months, I messaged a guy I knew from Facebook who was always posting about his journey to return to his ancestral roots. A journey inseparable, he argued, from establishing food sovereignty. I’d seen a picture of him at a picnic table eating tacos filled with groundhog meat, so I wrote to see if he’d like another meal. He was all in, he quickly replied. He’d be over to harvest the groundhog as soon as I was gave the word.
Thirty minutes later, he parked in my driveway, and from the backseat of his car, pulled a long metal spear. The groundhog was trapped so things would be quick, he assured. Though he sounded confident, I couldn’t help but notice his spear wasn’t very sharp. Upon closer inspection, I realized it wasn’t a spear at all - it was a rusted picket pulled from a wrought iron gate.
Wait, will that work? I asked, brows raised, nodding at the picket.
The tip could be a little sharper, he shrugged, but I can’t discharge a firearm within city limits, so it will have to do.
An hour later, the groundhog finally stopped moving. Tossing the body to the pavement, he leaned into the trunk of his car to grab a bag when the groundhog lifted its head from the pavement, making an agonizing attempt to drag itself away. It’s intestines, now on the outside of its body, left a dank smear of blood and shit a few inches long.
Dude! I yelled, jumping backwards. It’s not dead!
I can’t believe this thing hasn’t given up yet, he muttered, grabbing a rubber mallet from the backseat.
*
Weeks later, after yellow incisors continued to gnaw the edges of my sleep, I wrote to He Who Carries A Dull Spear.
I feel horrible about how much that groundhog suffered, I wrote to him. I should have said more, but I didn’t, and I feel horrible. I’m writing to ask if you think there’s a better way to harvest future groundhogs? Something quicker? More humane?
His answer was curt. I should 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 hungry 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 unfriended him.
*
Where do mansplainers get their water?
From a well, actually…
*
I smudged every corner of my house, then smudged my yard. Smudged the spot where rain had washed away the blood. Smudged myself.
Sage was not for white ladies, I’d heard, but it was the only thing that helped.
*
On a Facebook gardening group, one guy suggests a .22 for dealing with groundhogs. A few members call for him to be removed.
THIS IS A GARDENING GROUP, he’s admonished.
I am a gardener, he responds.
The moderator removes him from the group.
*
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, but encourages mindfulness around its relocation. Avoid making the groundhog another person’s problem, she advises.
Someone in the group calls her a Zionist, and two 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 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 schools and telling boys it’s cool to chop off their dicks.
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 plant nursery, I spot a beautiful Wandering Jew. A sign below it states that its name has been changed to “Wandering Dude.”
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 name it Lebowski.
*
What a gorgeous Wandering Jew! my Jewish friend says, pointing to my new plant.
I flinch.
Wandering Dude, I say.
Don’t you dare rename it, she says, rolling her eyes. It’s part our heritage, not having a home.
*
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.
On Facebook, a friend posts: Aaron Bushnell is a hero. His death was not a suicide, it was a political protest.
I ask him if he watched the video.
No! he writes. 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 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, cowboy boots, creme brûlée - calling them an infidel is funny, or just not right now?
*
Occasionally, the old marm who haunts the unheated schoolhouse of my solar plexus scolds me, her voice full of dust: Think its a good time to make jokes, while the planet floods and burns? While cities are razed to rubble? While children are plowed into mass graves? While homeless men take heroin mixed with 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 my fun.
You’re supposed to say unhoused, not homeless, she says, exhaling her vape in my face.
*
Two homeless men are found frozen to death behind a grocery store.
That’s what you get for shooting up in the woods when its -20 outside, I hear a man say. Fucking junkies.
*
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, her voice trembling.
*
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.
Cantaloupe works best, my farmer friend says, a cigarette pressed between her teeth. And a friend with a truck because that fucker will piss and shit everywhere when you move him.
Her personal method, she tells me, is to angle a plank against a five gallon bucket filled with water, then a trail of cantaloupe leading right into the homemade 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, meaning I’ve broken the law.
Settler-colonialist, I call my husband, who put on a pair of thick leather gloves before opening the trap to release it. The groundhog’s ass, fat from eating my veggies, jiggles as it disappears into lush grass.
That’s not an actual term you know, he says, peeling off his gloves before tossing them in the backseat of the truck.
Infidel, I say, laying on the gas, speeding away before we’re busted.
*
I read this online: 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. He’s screaming at a handful of students who are trying to stop the removal of the posters.
Some shrink away from the shrieking man. Some root him on, 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. Historically, do student activists have some sort of unique claim to moral authority?
I spend the next day digging.
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, sickened with understanding.
Then the grind calls. The bus pulls up, the egg 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, THAT’S 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.
*
There’s no way in hell I’m going to share my thoughts, I tell my husband, listing all friends who would cancel me.
Why would they cancel you, he asks.
Because you’re not supposed to feel conflicted, I snap, heading outside to burn a pile of brush.
*
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 - in my hometown, where I worked and raised my family - there was 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 remained suspended in terror. Blinds were drawn and doors were locked. Victim counts changed by the hour. Over social media, rumor outpaced fact. Parents tried to keep young children distracted, performing melodramatic readings of silly books. Inventing games.
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 all began to breathe again - just enough to feel our body - which no longer felt like our own.
*
Two months after the mass shooting, a 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, as they had in previous years. After two months of unspeakable heartache, a little warmth could go a long way, she’d decided. 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.
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 tossed in jail for his vote.
Residents who came out for the holiday event froze in their tracks, staring at the bloody caskets. Some, stepping out of their cars, heard “MURDER!” reverberating between buildings and drove straight home.
At some point, a local florist asked protestors to move up the street twenty feet, so customers could better access the entrance to her shop. The protestors refused. The woman running the holiday event asked the protestors, too, assuring them that this was not a request to disband, just to better share the street. They refused.
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 cried, tears streaming down her face. She’d participated in plenty of protests, but thought this one had hurt more than helped. A friend held her as she sobbed into her hair.
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 run into 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 grossly tone deaf. 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 clever. The last time I’d seen him, he’d stepped off a bus wearing a pink denim skirt, his bare shoulders glistening with oil. After swinging me in a circle, he left a slick of cherry lip gloss on my cheek.
He 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 arguments, 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 demands 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, doused himself in gasoline, and struck a match.
*
There are no words for the smell, a witness cried in an interview after Aaron Bushnell’s suicide, his face the color of 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 told that one of her teachers hates strawberries.
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 strawberry trauma.
*
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. Even if the book is from a gay Mi’kmaq man? he asked, making no effort to hide the snark. He grabbed my hand from across the table. Humans have found meaning in animals for all of time, and to think otherwise is stupid. But if you’re gonna be precious, he said, squeezing my hand with urgency, 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 under 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, gorging 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. Its medicine is that of going into the great unconscious to touch the mystery of death without dying.
*
A groundhog is also called a whistle pig.
My ASS is a whistle pig, 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.
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 its own smoke as fuel.
So, like the far right and the far left, he says, chuckling.
*
I’ve lost the secondary burn.
Smoke billows across the yard in choking gray sheets.
Reaching into a brush pile for kindling, something moves in my periphery before there’s a high-pitched whistle. A groundhog bolts from the brush 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 sprawling to the ground.
From the ground, I can see two small heads peering from the hole she’s running for. Before I can get back on my feet, she and her pups disappear into their burrow.
*
A sensation of heat pricks at my neck. My breath gets funny, ragged and fast.
Tears well and I blink them away.
They come back.
*
Once the panic attack dumps me back on the ground and my breathing slows, my vision goes from pinprick to panorama. There’s an emerald canopy of oak above my head, sunlight glittering through the spaces between the leaves. Geometric shapes of light shimmer across my body, disappearing and reappearing with the breeze.
My jaw lets go, hangs open.
*
I must look like a doof, 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 but for an occasional sough through the oaks.
Cautiously, they step from their burrow, heading for my garden beds.