THE SMITING IS COMING O SINNERS

Molly, the scourge of the local rodent population. 

It’s been windy since January. Or so it seems. No snow but lots of whushing sounds outside.

So, the dog, Molly. She dug up a nesting pair of shrews or something. Rodents with very short tails, not mice but they were mouse-shaped, if that helps everyone. The rodent she grabbed fought like the dickens. I got over there a bit late to save it. It expired before my eyes after I got the dog to ‘drop it’. I walked back over to where the dog had dug a hole to get at the underground-living shrews or whatever they were. There was a second one. Frozen as I stood over it. I stepped toward it and it went underneath the old boards, into the spring weeds and winterly dead leaves.

I went back outside, that same day, hours later, to check on my wind-whipped, probably don’t have a chance now, collection of veggies. A squash, two pumpkins, an eggplant…that poor cuke plant, ugh. I could hear a faint high-pitched calling. Not a bird. I know the local bird sounds;  this was something far different.

Some tiny voice calling for something that was lost.

I went very still, turned toward the fence. To that spot where Molly had dug out the two rodents and then killed the one…that ‘are you there, where are you‘ had come from where Molly’s nose had led her to investigate. 

I walked toward that still-raw hole in the lot next to the house, where the men folks park their giant tractors and talk of man stuff…and the calling stopped. Silence. Waiting for me to go away. So the calling could go forth again. Come home come home where did you go?

Actions have consequences. What a strange thing to learn so rather late in life.

Jake, to the left, and again, Molly. Note the hole dug…the rodents were not at home this time.

I keep waiting, for the winds that seem to eternally blow here in Eastern Oregon, to knock a giant branch off the elderly cottonwood. The giant branches that hang above the house like something out of the Old Testament.

They will smite us. Oh the smiting is coming, o sinners.

I kept waking now and then in the night, waiting. Waiting for that crash, that boom, the shock of limb striking roof, waiting for it finally to happen so I don’t have to dread the big whoooshy sounds outside at night or the day or ever. Nothing tornado-speed has come through lately, but it could.

And that little widow or widower rodent can perhaps rejoice that justice has come for the spoiled Lab in the smushed dwelling next door.

from Royal Queen Seeds. 

From last November. Me fiddling with the B/W setting. Oh the branches that hang over all our lives, eh? Usually laden with garbage-esque plastic bags. Some writer should take a whack at the symbolism here…