matchbook

o, I haven’t actually seen the fox, but I’m pretty sure it’s sleeping in our iris bed at night. Today is August, and the purple iris spires are long gone, but their tall graceful leaves would normally be standing up straight and strong except for the fact that this fox has made a bed there, flattening out all the leaves in the center of the wide bed. This morning, in fact, I found a second flattened area, smaller than the first, but right near it. A fox couple? A parent and child? Just two friends? Or maybe a single fox who likes a couple of choices. The flattened areas are too small for deer and coyotes. I’m hoping to see this fox or these foxes before too long, but I don’t know what time they go to bed, so it’s hard to plan a lookout.

Years ago we had a big family of foxes living under our shed and the kits would squeeze out from under the boards and run around and play and nurse from their mother, who was slender and gorgeous. I also suspect the foxes are eating the rabbits because I haven’t seen any of those in a couple of days. I miss them dearly. I find rabbits so comforting and sweet, bouncing seriously along and grazing in our clover, their mouths moving constantly, noses wiggling like crazy, up and down, up and down. They’ll be back; they find ways to survive. This spring we had a troupe of them living in the center of a brushy garden plot, and the very day I discovered them I accidentally discovered that a large group of rabbits is called a fluffle. Rabbits of different sizes would wander out in the early morning, and hop around through the roses and sage and butterfly bushes. Sometimes they ate things we didn’t want them to eat, but we never cared.

          That is where I live in my mind. I live there in my body too, but in my mind there’s a cool breeze even on the warmest summer day. A coyote was here three years ago, devouring fallen apples that were frozen into the snow. We were lucky to get some photographs, but we told no one. Here in my mind there is no “we,” but it’s a comforting word. In all truth, there is a “we,” but it’s not involved here. The we doesn’t hide with me inside the kousa branches or sneak up on the shaded side of the shed in order to spy on raccoons. The we is not fascinated by different types of moss and the we can’t smell clouds, and the we is rather noisy. I love this we, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not an I, and an I is the only place you can go sometimes.

          The foxes and rabbits, I suspect, never say “we.” Maybe the white-tailed deer do, but I don’t know; they’re rather circumspect. The foxes and rabbits arrange themselves in halos, and inside those halos are sometimes other rabbits or foxes, but none of them is superior to the others. This circle of light can contain one animal or many, and derives its inner glow from the fractured radiance of the sun or the moon. The phenomenon is more obvious in the winter, when crystals of ice refract and deflect, making rainbows in the halos and making the animals more contemplative than on normal days.

          We believe all this; we really do. Those of us who bed down at twilight in the iris bed believe it; those of us who munch in the prairies of clover believe it too. We never say “we,” but we believe it exists, because obviously gardens don’t flatten themselves into sleeping areas and obviously the clover isn’t busily digesting itself. I believe all this, and so do we. I live in a halo, refracted from the light of the moon. We live there together, I and we. When the world gets altered, everyone goes with it. It’s probably best to bed down in a cool bed of leaves and anticipate transformation.