Wicked Gusts

Sylvia Shawcross

Sometimes I think about the raccoons I fed during the orange sky days of a year ago, out there in the wilderness. Yesterday we had some wicked gusts of wind roiling up the branches and I could hear a soft whistle whisper at the eaves of the house I’d not heard before.

There was nothing there. It was as if the wind was singing to itself.

The cat and I listened for a long time until she decided to do her dementia routine and started her usual afternoon howling. She quite overshadowed the singing of the wind. She quite overshadows most noises here when she does that. I accept that this is her way of being now that she has grown so much older.

As I have. We all do.

One day perhaps I will wander about howling inconsolably. I’m surprised sometimes that I don’t do it now. I like to listen to the singing wind I guess.

I can only hope people will be kind then, when I’m howling. I don’t actually have much faith that they will be actually, in this world, where people make videos of broken people instead of aiding them. But perhaps that is just my thought for today. Perhaps robots taking care of us old people will be better than people. Someone will program them to be compassionate or at least pretend to be. Even the pretence is better than just simple diligence I figure.

In truth I still feed one raccoon. He is a small scraggly thing. I believe him to be the offspring of Myrtle-Godot because he knows how to play with the piece of plastic by the window to get my attention. The other odd ones I see don’t know how to do that. He must have been one of the wee little ones Myrtle-Godot showed me proudly last spring.

I call him Sinbad if only because I know I should not feed him. But I do.

He arrived with a terrible bite mark on his shoulder one day. Another day with a mass of burdocks in his rough hair. And when I feed him, he looks over to the front of the house with great fear… looking for the predators. It is a rough life out there for the little guy. I don’t know how long I’ll have him visiting.

I haven’t seen Myrtle Godot again. I hope she is playing in the forest. I like to think that anyway.

When I feed him now I think of the people who have suffered horribly for truth these last days in the drowning democracies. The embattled wearing burdocks and scars as surely as Sinbad does. They have fought and still fight for individual freedom. And I don’t know how long we will have them either.

There are greener pastures for the beleaguered and so many will surely find them. Few will stay to fight the global forces that run so many brutal games simultaneously because there is something horribly military about it all. About the precision and thinking behind the building of this new Utopia. As if we have to become soldiers in a war we didn’t get instructions for and aren’t trained for and certainly never wanted. And most certainly of all, never have really experienced in our lifetime.

Certainly Canadians are naive in that department. We all have learned or will soon learn what suffering as a society means. And that is a dark thought. And I am sorry to say it. That is the privilege of growing old. We just say it now. We don’t much care about the niceties the way we might have once.

But not to worry, we will one day own nothing and be happy! I want to tell that to Sinbad! “Look,” I’ll say, “out there you are looking for predators when it is really Utopia! Why can’t you see it?”

Can’t we all just see it! There are no bad predators out there. They are doing all this for your own good. They are saving the world. They are the good guys! See! Life will be beautiful. We will be happy.