ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME
©Jo Dereske 2014Chapter 15
Decisions and Raccoons
The reality was that our six months in Michigan would end in three weeks. Six months, we’d pledged; we’d commit six months of our lives to ease Louise and Mike from their farm into assisted living. We’d begun this venture because we loved them, because we believed it was too soon for a nursing home. More time on their farm was a gift we’d all wanted to give them.
The people who’d made that decision seemed very far away – all those “istic” words applied: idealistic, optimistic, unrealistic. Aside from our single failed visit to Meadow Manor, we hadn’t broached the subject with Louise and Mike, hadn’t done a single thing to make it occur. We’d been acting like we were living in a fantasy world that only required us to cope, not instigate any changes.
To be fair, coping – holding their lives steady – sucked more energy than I’d dreamed possible. Maintaining any equilibrium was pure triumph.
But now, carrying through with our original goal of a care home felt unspeakably cruel, and as Louise called deceit, “a dirty rotten trick.” Despite all the difficulties and challenges and downright disasters, they trusted us.
When I spoke with Ray the next morning we made a plan for him and Barbara, Kipling and me to get together in three days and talk through our choices.
“We knew this was coming,” Ray said, reminding me, “Kipling’s leave was only for six months.”
1931 Gordon went downstate looking for a job, then sent Tofelia a telegram to meet him in Grand Rapids, so off she went. Stella and I are not crying about it.
Helped buzz firewood. Afterward Bill and I skied on the hill and I fell most every time. Came down once on my head. Gosh but it hurt! Billy made a cute walking stick for me. Snowed and blew later. Road drifted closed.
After I got off the phone with Ray, I looked for Kipling to tell him of our meeting plans and found him maneuvering the live trap he’d used to catch Morris’s enemy into a thicket of shrubbery next to the bird feeders. “Raccoons are marauding again.” He baited the trap with chocolate cookies from the grocery store. “I don’t want any more cats,” he said, explaining his choice of bait.
“It’s a good thing there aren’t any five-year-olds around here, then,” I told him.
The next morning a large raccoon rocked the trap, racing and pacing the confines of its cage, gripping at the wires and making raspy sounds in its throat.
“What are you going to do with it?” I asked him as we stood a good ten feet away watching the angry animal.
Mike had once told Kipling to shoot any raccoon he saw. I knew that wasn’t going to happen. “Be careful. They’re infamous for carrying rabies.”
He walked around the cage. The raccoon backed away, never shifting its bright eyes from its captor.
“I guess we’d better take him to the woods and release him.” He glanced toward the house and I knew he was thinking we needed to do it before Mike spied the animal.
He backed the truck close to the trap and threw an old blanket over the wire cage. “Can you grab the other end? Don’t touch the wire.”
With the animal jumping from one side of the enclosure to the other, we gingerly loaded the cage into the truck bed. I could smell the raccoon’s feral, musky odor.
National Forest land abutted Louise’s land but we didn’t want the raccoon returning so we drove five miles away, with Kipling considering and rejecting various sites until he pulled off the gravel road next to a small stream. We carefully unloaded the trap from the truck and lugged it deeper into the woods. The raccoon moved erratically inside the cage, throwing us off balance on the uneven ground.
The stream babbled over mossy rocks, and sunlight played through the trees. The raccoon paced its confines in its rolling gait, finally settling against the wire, its eyes on the free world.
Kipling lifted the cage door and the raccoon leapt out. As it jumped, stretching out its body to flee, we spotted two rows of swollen teats hanging from her pale belly.
“Damn it,” Kipling said. The raccoon was a nursing mother and we’d separated her from her babies somewhere close to the farm while she was now miles away.
We stood helplessly staring in the direction she’d bolted. The bushes shivered, then closed silently behind her passage, leaving no trace. There was no way to recapture her and return her to the farm now.
Kipling spent the next two days searching the farm, walking my trail, checking the outbuildings and hollow trees for the raccoon babies but didn’t find any sign of them.
Under the influence of summer, Louise awoke as soon as the sun rose, sitting on the patio in layers: her robe over shorts, long-sleeved shirt over sleeveless shirt, layers she’d peel off one by one as the day heated, frequently remaining outside all day long, turning her metal chair to face the sun like a sunflower. Her skin tanned to mahogany and her moods mellowed, “I wish I didn’t have to go inside to pee,” she confided.
“I could clean all those bags out of the outhouse for you,” I suggested, motioning across the driveway where the old green and white outhouse stood beside the garage. Years’ worth of neatly stacked and folded brown paper bags filled the outhouse from floor to ceiling.
She grinned. “Do it. But don’t throw the bags away. They might still be useful.”
Mike shook his head as I carried the bags by armloads to the garage so Kipling could surreptitiously haul them to the landfill. I swept out cobwebs and then scrubbed the concrete floor, using hardened soap from an old orange Spic and Span box. It was a first-class outhouse with finished and painted walls inside and a paned glass window. A framed picture of a basket of flowers hung on the wall.
I “glowed,” wringing with sweat by the time I was finished and had even found a rug to spread on the concrete floor, “so your feet don’t get cold,” I told her. Her shoes had come off with the warmer weather and she rarely slipped into a pair. Even the soles of her feet were tanned.
“I feel like a queen,” she said as she inspected the outhouse.
But she never stepped into the outbuilding again, and when I asked her if she used the outhouse, she told me with finality, “I can’t. It’s filled with paper bags and I don’t want to move them.”
The warm weather also awakened thoughts of love and sex in Louise. She asked to see an X-rated movie. She inquired not-so-subtly how “busy” Kipling and I were in bed.
She saw me mowing and motioned for me to stop. “Don’t wear yourself out, or you’ll be too tired for sex tonight.”
Louise’s skin tended toward dryness and I often rubbed lotion on her legs and arms. Rubbing above her knees one afternoon she said, “If you go any higher, I want Kipling to come over and do it.”
“No way, Aunt Louise. Even if you’re my aunt and you’re eighty-two years old, there’s no way.”
She was tickled and asked slyly, “Are you going to tell Kipling what I said?”
“Definitely not,” I told her.
“I don’t think I’ll tell him either.”
Of course, I immediately told Kipling, whose ears turned pink.
“Mikey,” I heard Louise say over the intercom on a dusky summer evening. “Go lock the door. Let’s make love.”
I turned off the intercom.
I told the visiting nurse that we four were having a meeting about Louise and Mike’s future. She agreed it was a good idea and warned me, “You could check on them twenty times a day but maybe during that thirty minutes you’re not here one of them could fall and injure themselves, or have a heart attack and lie on the floor until it’s too late."
Darkness had fallen and we’d gone through two bottles of wine before we could bring ourselves to discuss Louise and Mike’s future as a problem we had to solve. Until now our focus had been on how to make the situation work, not how to end it. No matter how many times we tried to assure ourselves it was necessary, a nursing home was betrayal, and I keenly felt my failure of not preparing Louise and Mike for such a drastic change.
“There are good nursing homes,” Barbara said. “I’ve checked with nurses at work. There are two that have been especially recommended.”
“Mike might make the transition easier than Louise,” Kipling said. “He probably wouldn’t realize where he was.”
“But at least the farm is familiar to him,” I protested. “You might as well write him off forever if he goes into a nursing home. He’d never be able to orient himself.”
“Louise would be angry at first,” he continued – a major understatement – “but with her memory she might forget.”
We were silent a few moments, imagining Louise’s grief and rage, picturing her and Mike confined to a kingdom of one pastel-colored room. Being called “hon.”
“Are you saying we haven’t made any difference here?” I unreasonably challenged, “that she’d just forget the past six months, that we were even here? Then why did we even bother to come back?”
"This is what they wanted," Ray soothed. "They asked to stay at home as long as possible. And that’s what we’ve made happen.”
“Is a nursing home our only alternative?” I asked for the umpteenth time. I drew circles on my yellow pad. I thought better when I held pencil and paper. “What about moving someone else into the little house to care for them?”
“Who else would do it?” Ray asked. “We can’t afford 24-hour care, and we couldn’t expect the same kind of care you’re giving them. I can’t see Louise accepting anyone else being here now.”
“But maybe it would be worth the risk,” Barbara said. “We might be able to find the right person, a couple, maybe.”
The difficulties had been incremental for us; I couldn’t imagine anyone new stepping into the topsy-turvy world we’d grown accustomed to. At some point, Louise and Mike would have to go into a nursing home. The demands of their care would require professional skills. We'd witnessed their slow but steady deterioration just in this short time.
Ray looked at Barbara. “We could . . .”
I shook my head. Ray and Barbara had jobs and were raising four children, besides managing Louise and Mike’s legal and financial lives. Not to mention sharing in our struggles. For them to do any more was out of the question. We sat, reluctant to set the next stage in motion, feeling a grief as painful as mourning a death.
“They have damn little left now,” I said, thinking of all Louise’s dead siblings, her lost independence, her memory, “and we’ll be taking away that.”
“They’d still be together,” Barbara reminded me, “and cared for. Safe.”
“No one can fault you for going back to Washington,” Ray said. “You've already given them more time here than they would have had otherwise.” He hesitated and said to Kipling, “Your leave was for six months.”
Kipling nodded. "For this to have been a success," he said, thoughtfully rocking back in his chair, "even though none of us has said it, meant we were hoping they'd die at home while we were here."
He was right. It was bewildering that we’d hoped for and dreaded the same occurrence. The event we most wanted to happen, and least of all.
We lapsed into a melancholy silence, obviously not willing to accept the hard solutions on this night, too sorrowful and guilt-ridden to make a firm decision. How could it be that after all this time we still needed more time?
“What if we think about how to proceed for a few more days and have dinner on Friday?” I suggested. “Our choices will be clearer by then.” I couldn’t hide the hopeful note in my voice that by Friday our path would be obvious – also that we’d have stiffer spines. Postponing, that’s all I was doing – yet again.
“Some time limits and guidelines will help,” Kipling agreed, “including how we prepare Louise and Mike.”
Barbara and I looked at each other. Time limits and guidelines? How could we possibly apply the cold reality of time limits and guidelines to the world of Louise and Mike?
1931 A break in the weather so Billy worked all day in the fields helping Dad pull stumps. He likes being out in the fields all day. City boy. I helped Mother clean and do washing and baking. Rye bread. Johnny played a bad trick on Stella, and Dad should have whipped him. He gets away with it because he’s the baby.
I sat outside on the swing, listing pros and cons for caregivers versus nursing homes on my yellow pad, when I spotted Kipling near the old raspberry canes, beckoning to me. He’d begun cleaning out the grass and weeds so we could more easily pick the berries.
He raised his finger to his lips, so I cautiously crept up beside him.
Twenty feet away, nearly to the top of a raspberry cane, a tiny face peered at us, its black eyes sharp with curiosity.
It was a baby raccoon. It clung there, the plant swaying beneath its weight, giving us its full attention. “Do you think it belongs to the mother we released?” I whispered.
“I’d like to believe that,” he whispered back, “but that was almost a week ago.”
Slowly, Kipling crept up to it. The baby didn’t move, only watched. He extended his hand and lightly touched the baby’s head. It jumped off the cane and darted into the grass.
“Well that was that,” he straightened and said in a normal voice. “It’s probably gone back where it came from. I didn’t know there were so many raccoons around. ”
We were almost to the barn when we heard rustling. I turned to look behind us. Not just one clump of grass was quivering and swooshing but several, and the movement advanced straight toward us. I gasped, ready to run.
But bursting out of the grass tumbled five baby raccoons, all identical in size and appearance. They screeched to a halt when they realized we’d stopped and began milling around and over each other. Gamboling. We watched their play and began walking away again. They followed after us. We stopped; they stopped. And once more.
“Do you remember reading about baby ducks in psychology class?” I asked Kipling. “They imprint on the first thing they see after they hatch. And in this case, I think that’s you.”
The raccoons strung out behind us, following our path to the little house, darting aside whenever Kipling tried to touch one, but then falling back into line behind us.
Kipling was certain their mother was still out there, that they didn’t belong to the mother he’d trapped, so he rigged up a large cardboard box with old blankets in it and put in a dish of Morris’s cat food, leaving the box and the babies outside the back porch. They crowded around the cat kibbles, scarfing them down. “If the mother’s around they’ll be gone in the morning,” he said.
They weren’t inside the box in the morning but as soon as the back door slammed they tumbled out from beneath the back steps, piling on top of one another, all of them gazing at Kipling expectantly, and it appeared to me, with adoration.
For two days, the five baby raccoons happily hung around the house, letting Kipling feed them by hand, although still shy of his touch.
“This is like a black hole for animals,” my brother Ray said.
But near the end of the second day, Mike discovered the raccoons. “God oh God,” he said, staring into the cardboard box. He couldn’t remember what the animals were called but he recognized his old enemies.
An hour later while we were cooking a pasta salad, Kipling suddenly bolted out of the kitchen and I followed him to see Mike shuffling toward the huddle of raccoons carrying a cement block in both hands. His face was tight with determination. “Sonsabitches,” he repeated as he loomed ever closer to the babies.
Kipling diverted him but it was obvious the baby raccoons couldn’t stay on the farm. Once again we loaded up the cage in the back of the truck, and then, one by one he caught each baby in a towel and set it inside the trap that had held its mother. We drove to the exact same spot beside the stream where we’d dropped off their mother and lifted the cage to the ground. He opened the trap and we waited in the truck, out of their sight, watching as they cautiously emerged from the cage into the new world. After spending a few minutes unconcernedly playing in the open, they tumbled off and disappeared into the bushes just as their mother had.
1931 Billy had a letter from John that it was time to come back to Chicago so he left this morning on the 10:45 bus. I’m feeling blue already. A beautiful spring-like day. The paper says this was the mildest February in years.
Next Tuesday, Chapter 16: A Decision is Made