There was rain and no small winds that late evening. The growing gibbous shone bright around my chattering wet neighborhood of trees and brush, driveways and houses. I was under the carport enjoying the cool moist gusts when I heard a skittering on gravel, or pavement… both? It wasn’t startling, it just perked my ears up in time for a low moan which was startling. I wasn’t alone. Several tittering noises in two pitches rang out collectively—raccoons. For folks from some parts of rural North America, this is an unmistakable sound.

Around my second grade year, my parents were selling the house. I told one guy who visited that there were raccoons under the barn because I truly thought that was a selling point. I was wrong, as I would grow to realize, raccoons are not good neighbors. They are the monkeys of this continent. (Monkeys are terrible, is the premise here. I welcome your debate. You will lose. Monkeys suck.) They are crafty and sneaky and will steal whatever food they can get their actual hands on. Hands! Unlike monkeys, raccoons are very good at washing their food before consuming, which is actually pretty cool.

When I taught in Taipei, our school would sometimes go to the zoo where, as North American mammals, raccoons have a cush home. The kids absolutely loved all the masks and hands of them. They couldn’t understand why I wasn’t equally smitten. My students also didn’t care, while I inevitably questioned my own motives. The only time in life I’ve seen raccoons eating not garbage, neither bothering anyone. Happy raccoons? Or bored and lying in wait.

By this time in my current night underway, I’d realized I needed to remove myself. The whole scuffle were all right up within feet of me, noisy and busy in the dark. In their unknown number they continued their yelping and threatening, respectively, as I sneaked inside and shut the door. The group stayed in motion within sight of my view, deeply tucked into shadows; I still couldn’t make them out. Somebody continued groaning and then there was a scuffle. The yelps took on a higher pitch. All this proceeded as I realized I have on an outside light near enough. I turned it on, expecting to scatter the ruckus. Raccoons indeed! I saw that two were little, though certainly big enough to do some damage. Whoever had been angry—another raccoon? a cat? any theories please reach out—-had bailed from the pool of light in which now the babies and their mother seemed to collect themselves. Each pounced on the others in a frantic way, the biggest one shoving the babies along with her body. They crept in a waddle as a messy, aimless group, over to where birdseed was scattered in their reach. Where I’d tossed it. Never doing that again. Hello raccoon neighbors, please don’t stay.

In the morning: a baseball-sized pile of perfectly tubular and pointy black scat in the middle of my driveway. Raccoons.

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