Marcia Yudkin

​All Hail the Conductor

Spring nights ring first with the shrill cacophony of the peepers, nature’s orchestra warming up in the highest registers.  Weeks later, the bullfrogs enter, deep bass strings, unseen: plomp plomp plomp.  As the slumbery days lengthen, a beaver’s furry slap on the water punctuates a silence.  The great blue heron takes off with a hard flap, then a honk.  Dark clouds gather and rumble in growls that crash, releasing a fizzy downpour.  Finally a lumbering bear splashes into the marsh.  It can swim!  Its paddling barely pings as wasps, bees and hummingbirds chitter a melody that promises fragrances and stings.
 
**

Encounter

Ahead of me as I run on our narrow road, a black blob a bit bigger than a bowling ball humps from asphalt onto a neighbour’s gravel drive.

As I near, the porcupine maintains its ponderous pace, but snaky-squiggly, as if woozy from drinking something it shouldn’t have.  It’s a walking weapon, capable of wounding a curious dog or mountain lion.

Close up, quills lay smooth on its furry exterior, glistening with silver.  The creature’s plump, rounded shape seems adorable as a waddling baby while it wanders into shin-high weeds and vanishes from sight.

So prickly, so cuddly – such a mixed-up apparition on a morning when the school buses, the fix-it trucks, the still sleepy drivers have rumbled away to their urgent business. 

**

Drought 

Forty days and forty nights now, we haven’t had what WTVV calls a “soaking rain.”  The spillway at the end of our lake glistens with a mere trickle in the middle, and fallen leaf heaps along the roadsides crackle, papery and brittle.

Our well goes 400 feet down to a rocky water table, so no worries for our faucets going dry.  But Red Flag warnings blink neon don’ts on town-line signs.  On our remote road, a not-snuffed cigarette tossed, like the drunk-up beer cans I round up, can spark apocalyptic havoc.

As cloudbursts, lightning storms and even drizzles stay away, I needn’t time my run by the weather forecast.  With tepid day and night-time temperatures, it feels like a Sun Belt holiday.  So long as it passes, is this parch so bad?  I watch for moose, deer and foxes wandering down the hill to drink what remains in the creek.

A ferocious plague or a mild reprieve: Like debaters arguing both sides of a room, delight and danger battle.  

**

Threading the Pain
 
While he burned bacteria off the needle with matches, I shifted the sticks and leaves beneath me into a lumpy-carpet bed. What had my meditation teacher said?  Without thoughts, beliefs and expectations, pain doesn’t become suffering.  One-pointed attention – the now, now, only now – sounded then like a trick, a myth, a poof-it’s-gone sleight of mind.
 
As James bent over my mashed-arm wound, I shut my eyes and opened to the moment.  Amidst the prick, push, tug, I concentrated everything I had on steel, skin and thread.  Prick, push, tug, amidst a tuneless hum, an ashy smell, flames flaring on the screen of my closed lids.  Don’t resist!  Prick, push, tug.  Tug, tug.  At last, a blessed pause.
 
Opening out of the darkness, I saw the red-streaked stitching.  It throbbed, a pendulum clock striking the hours from under my surface.  James’s solemn, sorry face reverberated with that rhythm.  Had I vanquished pain?  Already I couldn’t remember.

**

The Killing Season 

December’s first two weeks: where I live, the season of orange.  I wear a slippery blaze-bright vest outdoors.  It’s one-size-fits-all, but without the metal clip I add, it droops.  The vest keeps deer hunters from shooting me – for their sake and mine.  No hunting within 500 feet of a dwelling, say the rules.  No hunting within 150 feet of a public road.  

It’s just two weeks, I tell myself.  Let them have their sport.

I’ve seen dead deer roped onto an SUV roof.  A fresh carcass hanging from a crosspiece between two trees.  A stranger with a shotgun stepping briskly into woods where I normally wander.  Pickup trucks parked along dirt roads where usually no one stops.

It’s meat for the rest of their year, I tell myself.  Let them have their sport.

Once during hunting season, my husband came home from a run. “A hunter shot a deer on our land.  They’re by the brook, halfway to Sam’s house.”  I grabbed my vest and strode righteously until I spotted the man, stroking a downed deer.  Just 50 feet from the road, above the brook.  “Hey,” I called down.  “You’re on our property.  And you’re way too close to houses.”  

Stupid, stupid, I tell myself.  He has a gun.

On a bed of crinkled leaves, he stroked the deer, whispering to her, gentle as a mother.  “I shot her up the hill and followed her,” he finally said, not an ounce of belligerence in his voice.  “She was badly wounded, looking for water.  Half an hour and we’ll be gone.”  In his orange hat and jacket, he kept his gaze on the deer, murmuring and stroking.  I watched, an onlooker at a funeral.

He’s incredibly respectful, I tell myself.  Let them have their sport.
 
**
 
The author of fiction in Yankee, Writers Forum, Flash Fiction, Bright Flash Literary Review and New Stories from New England, Marcia Yudkin advocates for introverts through her newsletter, Introvert UpThink (https://www.introvertupthink.com/).  Her essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ms., Next Avenue, Flash Boulevard and NPR.  She lives in Goshen, Massachusetts (population 960).