Little visitor

Sunday morning, as if on cue, the sun came out of it's sulks behind the week-long clouds and shown bright and beautiful for my birthday [now I've hit the "more" part of this blog's title] and for Noah's graduation and for the party that went with it all. Gratefully I put my chair on the patio and settled down early in the morning to read the NY Times. A tiny visitor came tentatively tiptoeing through the grass from my neighbor's patio. Mouse size, but not acting like a mouse and with bigger ears, I was intrigued by the little guy who seemed to be curiously searching for something. He did not scurry or scamper away when I made a movement but turned to go back next door. There he inspected that patio as he had been starting to inspect mine.

I went in and got my camera and when I returned, so had he, walking along beside the slider door, then he went away again, came back again. I never saw a mouse act like that. I came in and was going to go next door to knock on my neighbor's inside [not patio] door to show her our visitor. But her newspaper was still out front so I thought she must not yet be up -- it was not quite 7:30. I went out to see the little guy and was truly befuddled until later when I told Rachel and showed her my photos. She solved the mystery, it was a baby o'possum who seems to have lost his mother. This made me very sad although I couldn't think of a thing I could have done. There are many bushes along the sides of this building and areas of trees around the borders of the yard. Besides the geese and many other smaller birds, I've seen squirrels and a chipmunk and neighbors discussed a mallard that had ducklings in a nest on another side of the building.

This is an extremely populous town yet it seems some kinds of wildlife abound. I was told by a friend that she had seen a deer not long ago. I know that Molly, the dog, has at times become too well acquainted with a skunk. Today's paper had an article saying there are at least 30,000 beavers in the State of Massachusetts which cause much consternation in some towns. This is all very enchanting after my years in the Big Apple with it's abundance of dogs and cats, plentiful pigeons and far too many rats although I mostly did not see the rats, I knew they were there. I suppose they're around here too. They seem ubiquitous but adept at staying out of sight.

I keep thinking of the little possum and hoping he found his mother. He had great round translucent ears that made him look sweetly appealing. In fact, my few other sitings of possums have not endeared them to me.