Night Creatures

My husband and I are well-loved and visited by night creatures. There were once seventeen raccoons on our deck, fighting over six boxes of stale crackers I had poured out to see what would come out. It was fun for me watching them slap and screech at each other when they thought someone was eating more than their share. A white-faced opossum used to come to our porch every night to eat hard crunchy cat food. We saw one dead in the street on a bleak autumn day, and both of us expressed worry that it might be our opossum. I think it was. We have a new smaller grayish opossum now, that creeps up to our porch every night around seven o’clock. It is an ugly mutt, much smaller than the pretty one, with that ugly gnarly pink rat tail, but she waddles up, next to the cat, who welcomes her. I hide in the house, watching her, pleased. Sometimes the dog gets hysterical and barks madly about it, but she stays inside next to me, safe, scared to death of night creatures that fascinate me.