Portrait #1
The girls and I took to calling him “Boneless Weasel,” a groundhog who one day announced himself from under the empty barn on our land in Essex. He’d dart between the dandelions and split the unmown grass until spring labored into summer, and summer into the first thin, cool day of September, jellied paunch undulating as he skittered over lawn and into bush. When he hoisted his block frame atop a stump like a kind of fur-spangled orator, he seemed eager to direct the goldenrod and aster to please open their hymnals.
His visits never failed to bring joy, my youngest daughter, Sophie, alerting her big sister, Grace, “Look, look, there he is!” as he bounded from the sugar maple to the relative safety of the barn. Or as we opened the doors to our car, the beast merely yards away. Sometimes we’d discard stale bread or the bottoms of freshly snapped asparagus near the opening to his burrow,
