two cheeks to the wind
Harrisburg, PA! - it's one hell of a drug
The 7:30 a.m. English Mass at St. Francis of Assisi is a select little band of Apostles.
There are six women, one grandfather, a man with a “Constitution Party” hat and three friars, one of whom leads the Mass.
Our twelfth Apostle is the Church Cat, Angelo, who saunters around the church, mewing his greetings to each person, during the Liturgy of the Word. Angelo is an overweight light grey tuxedo with tabby markings on his back and tail. He inevitably finds his favorite person, Brother Joe, on the altar sometime around the offertory. After communion, Angelo will walk across the sanctuary, sniffing the roses in front of the altar and exploring the ferns by the large Our Lady of Fatima. An inlaid wood mural of the Apostle of Assisi hangs over the tabernacle, approving, I think, of Angelo’s devotion. Laudato si, o mi signore, baby.
Sunday morning I woke up and put on the red dress that hung off my shoulders loosely one year ago. I have gained weight, I thought, and not for the first time this winter. Sitting on one’s derrière, writing a book for six months is bound to lead to excess fat.
I need more exercise, I thought.
Be careful what you wish for.
I walked downtown (this word is doing a lot of work when describing Harrisburg) to Mass at the Cathedral. A small girl came up beside me when I sat down for the first reading and whispered in my ear: there’s a hole in your dress.
Now, the red dress is slinky (particularly when you’ve added a few pounds around the hips) and I was wondering if this was Harrisburg-code for informing me that the thin straps and low back, revealing the tattoo on my left shoulder was—as I had considered for a moment—too much for Harrisburg, PA. There is a large hole, I thought, if you want to put it that way.
Instinctively, I reached for my back. No, the girl whispered—pained—it’s closer to your legs. This poor girl had been sent by her parents to inform a woman thrice her age that there was a large hole in my dress, exposing both my cheeks—and not the ones on my face.
Thank you, I said, refraining from blushing, because the poor girl was already so embarrassed. Thankfully, I had worn decent panties underneath the dress (which the hole put on full display!): black, tasteful coverage, no holes in the lace, as stylish and civilized as you would hope your underwear would look if it were unwittingly exposed to the entire congregation of a Cathedral behind you.
Thankfully, also, I had brought a sweater with me, in case the Cathedral was cold or I wanted to cover my sinful shoulders or I was feeling chonky mid-Mass. When wrapped around my waist, it blessedly covered my entire backside. Arriving home, I noticed that the dress had ripped nearly the entire length of a seam. How did I not notice that this morning? Probably because I was focused on my protruding tummy. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, I thought.
So, after changing into my bike shorts that I have worn for over a decade and have stretched so shapeless that they are basically threadbare and worn through (I never learn), I went out back into the garden to begin watering the vegetable beds.
As I connected the hose line, I noticed what looked like a fat grey cat gallumph out from under the garden fence. (There are more cats on this block than in the entire city of Istanbul.) I was about to call “here, kitty,” when I realized the fat cat was actually the groundhog who had been terrorizing said garden. A trap had been set for Mr. Groundhog, and I noted that it had, once again, failed to catch him.
Lo and behold, as I made my way to the compost bin in the back of the garden, I noticed a small shape inside the groundhog trap. Mr. Groundhog was actually a Mrs., I realized, and there was her baby.
Baby groundhogs are adorable. Baby anything are adorable—baby is an evolutionary invention to get us to ooh and ahh at small baby rather than—as someone suggested regarding this groundhog—drown baby in the river.
Having no car at my disposal, I wondered how I was to get the baby groundhog to the Susquehanna River. The river is not far—just a mile’s walk. I had walked there this morning in search of exercise after Mass, sweater wrapped around my waist, feeling a slight breeze through the back of my dress. I felt very strongly I did not want to leave the groundhog in the trap overnight. That seemed, for one, cruel. I had just been reading about the Israeli government's six-month “administrative detention” in Stephen Langfur’s excellent book, Confession from a Jericho Jail, about his refusal to serve in the Israeli army against Palestinians in the West Bank during the first intifada, and the jail time he did for it. I wanted no part in any sort of system of carceration, for either human being or garden pest. Second, keeping the groundhog in the trap in the garden seemed impractical. I don’t know much about groundhog mother-baby bonding, but I figured the baby’s presence would only encourage Mrs. Groundhog to return to the garden and continue eating kale leaves fresh off the stem.
After making some phone calls (“Hey, Happy Sunday: could you drive me and a baby groundhog in a trap to the Susquehanna?”) I came up empty-handed. But I had spied a red dolly out of the corner of my eye. And it seemed, conveniently, the same size as the groundhog trap.
I borrowed a few of my cat’s favorite toys—old shoestrings—to lash the trap to the dolly. I also employed some duct tape for good measure. See below:
Now, there are a lot of good ways to meet your neighbors. But probably the best one, hands-down, is rolling a baby groundhog through the hood. And Allison Hill, make no mistake, is The Hood.
One of my tried-and-true City Survival Techniques as a young woman living alone has always been to act a bit crazy. Just a bit. To act just a teeny bit batty, as a woman, tends to mean people approach you as a person and not as a woman. Honestly, living at a Catholic Worker is the exact right kind of crazy: personalist, non-violent, well-meaning, for the common good.
I am thrilled that my first public act in Allison Hill was rolling a baby groundhog a mile downtown to the Susquehanna River. As Groundhog Lady for a day, I met a lot of lovely neighbors. They were curious, they were charmed, they were amused. The baby groundhog was adorable. And, of course, as I wheeled it down the hill, on its way to a better life, I could sense how anxious it was, so desperate to get out of the cage. I could sense this because he was clinging to the top of the trap, gnawing at the rusty metal bars.
It is a terrible thing to have another living being at your mercy. “You are going to be just fine,” I told the groundhog. “You’re going to be just fine.” But, of course, the groundhog had no way of knowing that. It had no way of knowing that its best bet at safety was staying in the cage instead of bursting out and running into oncoming traffic. A man—invested in this groundhog’s fate—wanted me to rescue another baby groundhog in an empty lot on the opposite side of the street. Sadly, my chance to be the Mother Teresa of groundhogs slipped away from me because he looked down at the curb and noticed fresh roadkill that was—undeniably—shaped like baby groundhog.
As we approached the river, a woman assured me I was going to the right place, as she had just come from City Island and seen a handful of baby groundhogs frolicking by the riverside. I wondered how many gardeners had walked driven the same path I had that day.
When we got to the clover-filled bank of the Susquehanna, the groundhog did not want to leave the cage.
As soon as he got far enough out of the opening that he could reach the clover, he started munching happily, half his body still in the trap. He was unconcerned about anything that had just happened: the loss of his mother, his mile-long saga, the cage itself. Here he was, in clover. After a bit of coaxing, he got all the way out. And, eventually, bounded away into the cover of the trees and reeds of the river bank.
My friend in theology school always accused me of not having “goals.” This story perfectly encapsulates why I fundamentally reject the framework of “goals.” Who has “rolling a baby groundhog down to the Susquehanna” on their five-year plan? But who, given the chance, would not hope that that is exactly where their life takes them? I have three degrees, I thought, halfway to the river. And each one of them brought me to this moment, transporting a baby groundhog one mile to humanely dispose of it in the fresh clover of a riverbank, far, far away from the community garden. And then write about it.
