Dear Ferret Folks-

Well, nothing much is happening on the FML since everyone is partying in
Toronto, eh?  (Bwa ha-ha-ha- ha!  I really do have Canadian friends who
end everything with "eh?" They simply cannot break themselves of the
habit.)

Let me tell you aboot the horror in my back yard garden.  (Another cheap
Canada joke.)

Here in New England, (Massachusetts), things are simply not growing.  I
planted my tomatoes, my peppers, (green and *black* just to be cool),
my eggplants, and I tidied up my three twenty foot rows of strawberries
months ago.  Then it started to rain.  And rain.  And rain.  It has
rained virtually every day now for several months.  There has, in effect,
been no summer.  Just a late spring that never ends, temperature in the
forties many nights.

My peppers were all two inches tall when I planted them in April.  They
are still two inches tall.  There will be no peppers this year.  Ditto no
eggplants.  (My husband says they all died, he looked yesterday.)  And I
don't have high hopes for the tomatoes.  No point in planting my yearly
thick row of sunflowers.  I didn't even bother.

That left the strawberries.  I had high hopes for the strawberries.  They
seemed to thrive in this weather, spitting out tiny-furred little green
fists that would someday be berries by the scores.  The white blossoms
seemed to stand up to the rain, never collapsing in upon themselves like
my Iris blossoms.  (Almost a total loss this year.)  They didn't simply
refuse to bud, as my apple tree did.  They weren't stunted, as my
delphiniums are this year.  They didn't rot, like my peonies.  They
flourished.

As I said, I had high hopes.

So, apparently, did she.

She.  Her.  I don't know what to call her.  That groundhog.  I know she's
a she, by the elegant flare of her hips.  Those are a woman's hips.

We were first made aware of her presence when my husband went out to
check on the (failing) garden a few weeks ago, back when we still had
hope that the rain might lift, and a few weeks of sun could strengthen
our fragile plants, and there might be vegetables this year.  All of a
sudden, in the quiet and still of the dripping green world, my husband
faced this big brown creature the size of a chubby cat, with a snubbed
face, and a darker brown tail than the rest of her chestnut-colored fur.
She *charged* at my husband, *hissing*, and drove him back into the wet
grass.

He was stunned.  Groundhogs are *rodents*, sly, secretive things that
prefer not to be seen.  They like to be left strictly alone, to dine on
dandelions and graze in grassy patches that receive little or no human
traffic.

But not her.

We speculated....where was she living?  Beneath the big brown wooden
spool (the kind college kids use for coffee tables) lying off to the
corner of the fence?  That's what she appeared from beneath, when she
drove my husband off.  Why did she charge like a bull, all spit and
vinegar?  Was she protecting babies?  We simply didn't know, and we
didn't se her again.

My strawberries, swelled with fresh rain, began to pinken, then fulsh
orange, then red.  I eagerly looked forward to collecting them, and
harvesting a few stalks of rhubarb, one of the few plants undaunted by
the weather.  You can't *kill* rhubarb.  You can make it angry, but you
can't kill it.  I was thinking strawberry rhubarb pie, something my
husband was lobbying for on a daily basis.  But on the very few dry days
that I ventured into the garden, I never seemed to find any ripe berries,
only the half-ripe.  Were they simply not getting enough sun, rotting
before fully ripe?

I think you already know the answer.

We saw her today, from out of our second story window, the one that looks
out over the backyard.  My husband called me over, urgently.  "Come see,
get up!" I struggled out of the deep armchair in front of the computer,
and there she was.  She was standing perfectly still , the three rows of
strawberries beneath her belly, as if she were striking a pose.  Perhaps
she was.  Perhaps she was saying "These are MY strawberries.  Mine." She
maintained that dominating stance for a long time, watching us watch her.
Then, not too quickly, she turned tail, and waddled beneath the floor of
the pool shed, next to the garden.  A warm, dry, safe place, from which
she cannot easily be extracted.  No, she wasn't squatting beneath some
shabby wooden spool...she was *entrenched.*

I am going to go to The Price Chopper Supermarket, and buy some
strawberries.

*itch.

Alexandra in MA
[Posted in FML issue 5285]