When my mother can’t sleep, she grabs her flashlight and takes a walk on her acreage out on the great plains of Nebraska. There’s a lot to see and hear: for starters, this is the best place for stargazing. A dark dome overhead, with no light to compete, showcases shooting stars and constellations.
And the night is full of sounds you won’t hear anywhere else.
Their acreage is in the migratory bird flyway. Not far from them, half a million sandhill cranes converge on the Platte River – she hears their bugle calls. There are bald eagles, snow geese honking overhead, American white pelicans, ospreys and grebes. She hears owls and tundra swans – birds and waterfowl that I’ve only seen in the pages of my Roger Tory Peterson field guide. The nearby cottonwoods and grassland are a rest stop for bobwhites, Bell’s vireo, orchard and Baltimore orioles – masses of them. Last fall hundreds of monarch butterflies stopped on their way to Mexico.
Tomorrow her sister from Minnesota will stop on her migratory route to Arizona.
Then there are all the four-legged critters. She hears coyotes, but rarely sees these elusive animals. A few weeks ago, she came face-to-face with a large opossum and discovered that “they hiss and bare their razor-sharp teeth when cornered.”
Last night she saw another “possum.” It headed for a hole in the foundation of their house and disappeared. She sprang into action and closed that hole with some fencing and anchored that with a large rock.
Back in bed she heard the possum rearranging things beneath her and straining to get out. Perhaps he had some stargazing to do too?
The next morning, she removed the fencing, but by then the possum had found another way out. So she set about closing that opening in case he tried to get back in.
A few days later she heard a plaintive cry coming from the same location the possum had vacated, only to find her cat, Agatha, trapped under the foundation. She and my father quickly removed some of the fencing and freed little Agatha.
Who says you have to leave home to find adventure?
I told my mother that it’s fashionable in Connecticut to give your acreage a name. We have a property nearby that sits at the bend of the Farmington River named Riverbend.
“What would you name our property? she asked.
“Possum Hollow.”