What Keeps Me Up at Night

Since I have lived in this house, there has been a woodchuck who lives beside the garage. The hole he has made is gigantic. I mow around it and never get too close as I am sure that it would swallow me up.

That is what I think about sometimes when I can't sleep at night. I think about what to do about the woodchuck hole. I see the dirt around the opening slowly caving in and me disappearing beneath the garage. I imagine that deep inside his burrow, his extended family would greet me. I'd find all of the missing socks and spoons from the house down there. He would be sitting in his little woodchuck chair wearing a bowtie and asking if I would stay for a while.

I've thought about trapping him and moving him elsewhere but always worried that I would be moving the Dad and there would be ten woodchuck babies under there that needed him. Then I found out that you're not even supposed to move animals off your property and dump them off in the woods. Is it illegal? I don't know. I just decided that we would figure out how to live together. Sometimes, I make a half-assed attempt to fill the hole in. It never works. Those little woodchuck hands of his work double-time, and he makes the hole even more enormous.

A few days ago, I saw him across the street waddling towards the road. There was a car coming. He looked at the car, then looked at me and booked it. I am a person who loves nature and most living things, but I have to tell you, I secretly rooted for the car to take him out. But he made it. He ran under the neighbor's porch, and this morning, while he was snacking on a patch of clover, I think he gave me the finger.