Change of heart

For as long as I can remember I have been gardening. For equally as long I have hated the woodchuck. Unlike all other uninvited guests to my garden, the woodchuck took full advantage and chowed on the entire row of whatever was planted, or destroyed the prize pumpkin beyond recognition. I’ve always thought of them as evil, selfish, and deceitfully cunning. My vegetable garden in Upton sat above a tall boulder wall. At each rock juncture there would be a crevice, an entrance door, an invitation to set up house right below my delicious crops…giving full access to these voracious diggers to feast at dusk or dawn and make unavailable to me a harvest. They angered me so. Between my household and my neighbor’s, woodchucks in the teens were captured and brought to a “farm upstate.” Fences were trenched 2-4 feet down, dogs kept watch, as did I, and yet they continued to multiply and prevail. They were my arch enemy, and that became engrained in me, despite how “cute” and “smart” they seemed to the outside world of gardening.

…and then, so unexpected, as I was walking along my front roadside bed yesterday morning eyeing the progress of the bulbs, I heard from down the road a bit “Oh no!” I looked to see my elderly neighbor standing over the body of a dead animal, hit by a car (no doubt speeding in my 25 mph neighborhood, but that is another story!) “They killed a woodchuck,” she mourned. I watched as she picked him up by the tail to remove him from the crime scene and drop his limp body in the leaves on the side of the road. She stood over him and motioned a sign of the cross on her body as she was praying for him. I was saddened by the evilness of my heart in comparison to her deep compassion for the loss of a living soul. And I believe I’m having a change of heart. What a witness her actions were to me. I truly hope I, too, can be kind to the creatures that live around me…and as I wrote yesterday, live in a healthy tension to see who outsmarts who, and be grateful for the harvest that remains…without anyone getting hurt.