FOX & I - An Uncommon Friendship

I loved this book. The author, a former park ranger, earned a doctorate in biology and zoology then built a small cabin on an isolated piece of land in Montana and plotted her next move. 

As she accepts research projects and teaches field classes and leads groups of undergraduates through the Wilderness areas surrounding Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, we tag alone to learn things about the natural world that couldn't be taught inside a classroom.

But the main focus of this astounding book is her unlikely and inexplicable friendship with a red fox who visits her isolated mountain valley cottage at 4:15 every day. With traits that only humans should have, you will never view these small creatures the same again.

Fox & I is on my list of best reads of 2023.  My other top five to date (of course you're interested!😀) are: 

1. The Slow Horses Series (Mick Herron)

2. The Only Good Indians (Stephen Graham Jones)

3. Lessons In Chemistry (Bonnie Garmus)

4. Bear Town (Fredrik Backman)

5. An Invitation To The Party  (MJ Werthman White)

Tis the season for reading and writing and gift giving. I'd like to hear what some of your favorite books of the year are.

A Letter To My Mother

Dear Mom, 

I have finally learned to appreciate your favorite vegetable—sweet potatoes. I’m making a shepherd’s pie with a sweet potato topping for dinner tonight. Remember how you always asked us to check to make sure you had sweet potatoes in the cupboard where you kept your onions and potatoes while making out your grocery list? I regret rolling my eyes, wondering what the big deal was. On the list they went, price circled, so we wouldn’t mess up. Those were the only times I ever bought sweet potatoes. 

It must have been the sweet potato casseroles of old with marshmallows on top—though that was never your way—that charred fluffy topping cemented my revulsion to the lowly sweet potato. I’m not sure at what point I got over that, but I wanted you to know, the Irish in me has finally taken hold. 

I’m using lamb in the shepherd’s pie tonight instead of hamburger, and I know you loved lamb. (Those patties stuffed with feta, served with mint jelly on the side?) Finally, of course there’s dessert. Baked apples with whip cream. 

It’s cold and wet tonight, but there's an empty chair with a cushion on it by the heat register. I just wanted you to know how much I love sweet potatoes. I guess what I really want to say is I wish I had another chance to tell you I love you. 

Love,

Yvonne

   

The challenge today from Punam at d’Verse - For The Love of letters is to write one. "Before the onset of the digital age," she says, "letter writing was the only way to communicate long distance. (Long distance phone calls were expensive). Thus, learning how to properly write a letter was part of any young woman or man's education."

In the present age it is so easy to keep up with people. Yet, we lose something important. The personal touch! Letter writing delivers something more to the recipient than just the words on the page. The act itself shows how much we care about a person. It's the intimacy, the information we impart by way of our handwriting, our choice of pen and paper, that connects us with the recipient in a way that cold computer screens can't."

But when was the last time you wrote one or received one?  So, in the spirit of participating in this challenge (appropriate as we enter the holiday season), to rekindle and revive the dying art of letter writing in my own small way, I wrote this letter to my mother,

 

 

A STORY OF OPENING DAY

Back when pheasants were plentiful
Opening Day meant friedcakes hot out of the deep fryer—
Betty Crocker called them cake doughnuts
But mother called them friedcakes so friedcakes they were—
subtly spiced and dipped in glaze or sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar
and stacked in dripping pans to cool.

Opening day was hunters in camouflage jackets

and canvas vests lined with little pockets

to store bullets in. Traipsing in and out

the back door to sign in on dad’s clipboard

hung on a nail beside the dryer.

 

They would carry their birds back up the lane by the feet

stopping first to report in and get a friedcake.

A snapshot of one of the regulars

     Eddie in his bulging vest with his bird

     And a grinning preschooler full of indulgence in a fuzzy sweater.

What beautiful birds those ringnecks were.

 

1957

Gunshots echoed across the fields

The kicking up of leaves in galoshes and wool socks.

The warm kitchen smelling of hot oil and cinnamon

Friedcakes dripping frosting cooling in the pan.

A jostling around the counter to duck and grab

Mother in her apron and dad in his coveralls

Talking up the hunt and the camaraderie of neighbors.

 

 

2023

A Kindred Need

Chaff in the wind, grasshoppers on the fly,

the gathering up and the laying down.

Combines creep across the field

where sparrows hover and hide

in the dry rustle of the corn

storing up energy in their hollow bones

for fall portends winter,

when they’ll swoop over the land in concert of wing

for they need their kind come winter.

I heard a pheasant this past summer.
Never saw but heard the truncated chortle,

the two-note song. 

Was that a tail waving in the Queen Anne’s Lace?

I thought I heard a pheasant this past summer.

Can't resist linking this to Poets and Storytellers with their prompt in  favor of adjectives, reaffirming my belief that there are exceptions to every writing rule. And in answer to the prompt at What's Going On?  what do you love?, this post might only scratch the surface but Opening Day, then and now, are right near the top.