Mama Fox

Your days are numbered as a mother and so you might begin early to ready yourself for its dull-edged ending.

There are, of course, rehearsals built in along the way. Recitals. Practices. Nursing, for one. “Is this the last?” I’d think. “Is this the last time?”

So many holy moments.

Newborn eyes.

Breath like green-apples.

Last fall, in the early weeks of my empty nest, a Robin began building multiple ones along the rafter on our front porch, a fools work, day after day, because most of these nests were untenable on the beam, and tending to so many, she never finished a one, and was she even pregnant in September or had she, like me, gone a bit mad in the loss of her vocation.

When I was a girl of 10, living in Colorado, 2,000 miles from the sea, my soulmate left me, never to return, and I too went a bit mad, searching for her in backyards and under cars and up trees, arriving home with scratches and another cat in my arms who wasn’t my beloved Licorice, she who I’d loved and tended since she was a kitten.

My plan this past year was to empty the house, to lighten everything. “I will not live in a museum of our family,” I said, but what I truly meant was that I couldn’t bear to live inside the emptiness, echoing the absence of the lives once lived here.

What I did instead was the opposite. Each week, I visited the second-hand store stocking my home with odds and ends, dishes and knickknacks and books I still haven’t read.

The year that Licorice left had been my 4th year apart from my grandmother at the sea. We spent the entire summer together, she and I, ahead of that 2,000-mile divide. On the August day that I was due to leave, she had to tear me from her bed. When I returned for a short visit with my family the next summer, I discovered that my she had given all my things to the summer sale at the Yacht Club–including all the stuffed animal “friends” won for me on the boardwalk by my grandfather or uncles or family friends.

I hated her some for that.

All these years later, I suspect the presence of my belongings made my absence too palpable.

Which brings me to the baby foxes which is where every morning delivers me, in this, our third spring with the den just off my writing door (though maybe they’ve always been there, and it’s taken me this long to look with softer, sideways eyes.)

This May was the earliest I’ve ever come across the pups, and last week their eyes were still newborn-like, though in the five days since, they’ve already changed.

In just a few more weeks, they won’t stay put if I come close, or only one or two of the most curious will, and after that the communions will be fewer still, and I’ll wonder each time, “Is this the last? Is this the last? Is this the last?” until that day when the rock outcropping above their den outside my writing door remains vacant, and the only sightings come by chance, at the edge of the field and the woods or passing each other on the driveway after an early morning or evening walk, or being watched from the path behind the shed as I hang the laundry.

By then, I won’t know for sure if it is a pup or a parent I spy.

It was the mother herself who I saw first this spring or I should say: she let me behold her and she remained there on the rock outcropping after the pups scattered, staying still as I photographed her from a distance.

I came across her again over the past weekend when I went looking a little too close for her pups, waking her I suppose from a well-deserved nap, and she lept up, startling me, but she didn’t leave the outcropping, and instead paused at the top while I remained still at the bottom, and we gazed into each other’s eyes, in a soul-drenched moment out of time, reminding me of all those I shared with Licorice as a girl, one with the mysteries of mothering and life.

(Early June 2019)