Possums, Personally

But first, news:

When I picked up our son from school last night, the safety told me, "Ma'am, we have no school tomorrow and Wednesday -- too many people are out sick." And in my son's backpack was an official notification of same, from the superintendent. So he and I will be "sharing" the computer. (Why does "share" so often seem to mean that someone else gets what I was using?)

Personally, I don't find possums that cute, even if they do have opposable thumbs on their hind feet. They have flat little black eyes and a peculiar jerky way of moving, as if they were run by a remote control with a bad signal or a weak battery or something. I read once that biologist Vernon Bailey, measuring brain case size by filling them with dried beans, found that a possum's skull held only 17 beans. Or 21. Or 25, depending on which source you read. By contrast, a raccoon's held 150.

However many beans their little skulls hold, I didn't think I could count on it finding the gate it crawled in under, or figuring out how to climb back over the chain link fence, and I didn't want to wait around for that glacier to move. And although I grew up with bunny & deer hunters, I've always been too squeamish to be one myself, so I couldn't go out and kill it.

Carrying it out of my way and the dogs' way seemed like the fastest route to avoiding having the dogs go out and kill it, acquiring possum fleas and possum bites along the way.

Hedgehogs, of course, are the little "totem" animal for bobbin lacemakers, supposedly because a lacemaker's pincushion all stuck full of pins resembles the hedgehog with its bristles. I've seen one once in my life, in a little terrarium at a pet shop where I watered the plants once a week.

Coincidentally, just yesterday I read an article about St. Tiggywinkles, a wildlife hospital in the UK, that treats injured hedgehogs.