There was this place where the sidewalk pressed right against the flank of McKinnock Hill. Walking that section of sidewalk, you’d have ferns dropping moisture on your shoulders. It was a narrow sidewalk: you couldn’t walk on it and hold your left arm out straight. Too much McKinnock Hill in the way. But if you bent your arm, you could press your hand into the hill’s thick moss.

You could also kiss a bare patch of stone. That was the kind of thing we’d do when we walked home from school as kids: “Kiss that spot there … Gross! You just kissed McKinnock Hill! You’re going to marry McKinnock Hill!”

There were animals on McKinnock Hill. Mainly squirrels and chipmunks were what we saw, but sometimes there’d be roadkill—possums or the occasional raccoon. So we knew those lived up there too.

And foxes, too. A place like McKinnock Hill has to have foxes.



( At some point we heard a story... )

I have turned this little story into a PDF with the foxes in the header ;-) If you would like a copy--if you would like a copy to send to your millions of friends so that my flash-fiction reputation spreads like a tsunami worldwide!--you can message me here or send me an email at forrestfm (at) gmail dot com, and I will email it to you.

I got five questions from osprey_archer!

1. What's a skill that you're proud of having?

... I'm realizing that it's hard to write an answer to this because as soon as I start composing in a direction, I think, Now you really sound like an insufferable asshole.

Am I perhaps proud of the skill of being able to guess when I'm about to sound like an insufferable asshole? ... Mmmm, I am not particularly proud of that. And I'm not even sure if my assessment is correct, so.

So ... skill implies something that you've worked on and honed--so not, say, a one-off accomplishment, and not something that's just part of your personality without your particularly exerting yourself.

Okay, how's this: I don't know if I'm proud, exactly, but it gives me great joy and exuberance to have discovered, in my fifties, that it's possible to learn multiple languages more or less simultaneously well enough to read them and attempt rudimentary communication in them. It literally feels like having developed a new sense, like my brain has changed its shape. ... Other people knew this delight from a young age, but not me. And there's something about coming to it later in life--you can be very consciously grateful, appreciative.

2. What's a treasured memory?

Sleeping together as a family on summer nights in Japan--the tactile-ness. The in-out of our breathing, together; our hearts are beating, together. Our foreheads are touching, or someone has an arm flung this way, or someone's toes are touching someone else's calves. Outside, insects are singing.

3. Do you have any unusual yearly traditions?

Not really; I have a hard time repeating things cyclically. For a while our family did Boston's Walk for Hunger yearly, but that's not a very unusual thing, and anyway, we since stopped. There are certain things I like to forage when the time is right (cattail pollen in June, chestnuts and hickory nuts in September and October), but I'm not consistent.

4. If you could have a telepathic companion animal, what kind of animal would you want?
I waver between something small enough to sit on my shoulder and something large enough that I could drape my arm over its shoulders. Much as it would be fun to have a telepathic connection with a dolphin (hello Ring of Endless Light) and fascinating to have one with a celphalopod, I think I'd prefer to have a connection with a terrestrial animal because delightful as water is, I can't breathe in it or even keep air in my lungs for as long as dolphins and other water-living mammals can. OTOH, if there are some telepathic marine creatures out there who are hankering for a connection, I withdraw that caveat! Come to me, friends!

... I guess not someone really small, like a tardigrade. I want to be able to see my companion. Probably someone adapted to the type of climate I live in--hello coyotes, bobcats, foxes, bear, deer, squirrels, chipmunks, mice. And I don't want to exclude birds, though I think I would want a very friendly type of bird for an animal companion--someone like a catbird or chickadee, or like the starling that drank the last of my sister's wine the other day.


5. Favorite museum?

Without a doubt, the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.

Anyone else like some questions?

I tuned into an episode of The Moth Radio hour about halfway through a segment called "The Hat," by Omar Musa, a Malaysian-Australian author, rapper, and poet. The things he said about machetes and words stuck with me enough that I want to share them--those things, and an almost fable-like story of his father, which comes in the middle.

First, the machetes. At one point, as a teenager, Omar goes to visit his grandparents in Borneo, and they go to some family land, and his grandfather has to cut a path for them to get to the house. Omar reflects that the parang, the Malay machete, is associated with piracy and headhunting, but as he saw his grandfather clearing the path, he has a different impression:

suddenly in my head I realized that the parang ... can be something that forges a path between places that don't usually connect, places that don't usually communicate.

Hold that thought for the end, when he talks about words. And now comes the entrancing story of his father:

So we get to this hut in the middle of the jungle, and there's a family of orangutans living there, and we have to shoo them out of the house. And my grandparents tell me that when my father spent time at this little piece of land, he would sit in front of the hut, and he would read the Quran with this very deep, mellifluous, beautiful voice, and suddenly dozens of orangutans and families of monkeys would start climbing down from the trees and sit in front of him like a rapt audience ... and listen to him reading the Quran.

I couldn't stop thinking of it: his dad, like Saint Francis, sharing sacred text with the animals. I could picture it so vividly, all those orangutans and monkeys, gathered round, listening.

And then the last part: when Omar goes to his cousin's wedding and his cousin asks him to come on stage and do some hip-hop:

"Hey Omar, I want you to get on stage, I want you to do that thing that you do, that type of poetry, that hip-hop, that thing that you do in Australia, I want you to perform for us for the first time."

So he does, and then afterward...

And I stood there, and they were cheering and applauding, and I went and I sat down next to my grandmother, and my grandmother looked at me with these piercing eyes, and she said, "You know, I never learned how to read or write ... I've been illiterate my whole life; I left home at the age of nine, and tapped rubber and lived on the streets ... but I have 150 poems in my head that I created when I was living out there, kicked out of home at the age of nine, A-B, A-B, pantoums, the traditional improvised form of Malay poetry. This poetry that you're doing now is like the poetry that I used to help me get through these hard times."

And it was then that I realized I had found my own parang, my own machete, my words, my words that could cut through worlds, that could cut through time and even generation.

And I thought that was brilliant, because it was was the cutting that was doing the connecting, the sharp slicing not to hurt but to cut down barriers, so that people can find a connection.

Link to the complete segment: "The Hat"

On Monday, I was out for a morning run, not very far from home, when I came upon a possum that had been hit by a car. I was passing it, when I heard a wheezing, hissing, chirping sort of noise, and saw a little, blind, baby possum, with just a shadow of gray fuzz on its body, struggling by the side of the road. It had either been thrown there or had somehow managed to creep its way over. And then I saw that there was another, a little way off.

Those babies were in a desperate state, and trying so hard to stay alive.

So, I ran back home and came back in a car with a box. I picked up the two babies, looked for others, but didn't see any others that were alive. At home I wrapped a hot water bottle in a towel while wakanomori looked for wildlife rehabilitators that we could call. (yamamanama, you can bet I was thinking of you, but the place you volunteer at would be like two hours away, so I figured I'd try something closer.) Meanwhile those little babies were cheeping and wheezing away.

For those of you in Massachusetts, this page offers regional pages you can check out for this purpose. (For those of you not in Massachusetts, your state may have similar, or you can simply search on "wildlife rehabilitator.") Waka printed out the page for the Pioneer Valley, and I started calling.

It was still pretty early in the morning and no one was picking up. I left several messages, and at last got one woman, a vet, but she said that baby possums were difficult because they required tube feeding, and that she couldn't do it because she was traveling. She urged me to keep trying other numbers. At last I reached Medicine Mammals. The woman there told me she had a different method for feeding baby possums (involving a toothbrush--I guess they suck the bristles), and that she would take them.

She lives at the end of a dirt road, and the scene behind her house reminded me of Medwyn's Valley, for those of you who've read Taran Wanderer. When I opened the box to show her the possums, we saw that the two babies had made their way next to each other and were snuggled together.

After I turned them over to her and made a donation for her work, she invited me to come to the Pocumtuck Homelands Festival. "We'll have our tipi up and there'll be storytelling," she said. I was thinking, tipi?? The Native Americans in this area never made tipis. But it turns out she's Apache, so that explains it.

When I got home, I got a call from my town's Animal Control Officer. "Did you rescue some baby possums from George Hannum Road?" she asked. "Yes," I said, flabbergasted, because I hadn't called her, so how could she know? "Well, we removed the mother and there were other babies alive in her pouch, and I was wondering if you'd found a rehabilitator?" She must have been calling the same people I'd been calling, and they must have said that someone else from B-town was also calling about baby possums.

So I was able to tell her about Medicine Mammals, so maybe more of those sibling possums will make it.

Two gin and tonics, enriched and flavored by sweetfern (spicy, aromatic) and heal-all (can't discern its flavor,but it's in the mint family, and its name tells me it heals all!)

I practiced on a skateboard this morning. I still don't get it at all, but at least I see where and how I must get it. Lean to the left, lean to the right. Balance.

Goldfinches, hardly visible, but audible in the unrelenting blue sky. Sparrows. Mourning doves. Hawks. Also: things that rustle, invisibly, in the greenery. Snakes, chipmunks, squirrels, mice.

In bloom: yarrow, spotted knapweed, birdsfoot trefoil, black-eyed susans, meadowsweet, goatsbeard (mainly to seed), crown vetch, queen anne's lace, chicory, day lilies, purple clover, rabbit's foot clover, hop clover, butter-and-eggs (toadflax), purple toadflax, poke blossoms.

Could it be that the world is made of mathematics, and when we make music, we're reaching for those principles? Here is the number Tau (it's Pi x 2) played as music: