When I was a little girl, my Mamaw and I would sit on our back porch, raised up about ten feet in the air, wielding a piece of string and dancing it around over the family of raccoons we fed every day. They’d come out right at dusk–8:00 in the spring or fall, closer to 9:30 in the summer–and we would lay on our stomachs on the porch, silent except for the occasional stifled giggle, playing with the baby raccoons and their mother for as long as we could–before it got too cold or too late, or the sound of our dogs barking or the neighbor pulling into her driveway scared them off for the night. Regardless, we saw them every day. Mamaw had a way of knowing just when to peek out on the back porch to catch sight of a raccoon or possum or stray cat. She attracted them somehow; the food scraps we put out helped, sure, but they always seemed to trust her. She could walk right up to a wild animal and they wouldn’t mind. When we found sick or injured ones, we’d nurse them back to health. Mamaw would stick the ailing critter in a storage bin in our kitchen and tend to it like a baby. When they lived, they would come back and visit us on the back porch. If they didn’t make it, we’d have funerals in the backyard. She’d wrap the now-cold rabbit up in a rag from the basement and we’d dig a plot somewhere between the pool and the garage. Mamaw liked to fill them in herself after we’d finished gathering around the hole, her and my sister and I, but never gave us a reason. She’d just tell us to go play. She usually managed to save the creatures she found, but sometimes even she wasn’t magic enough and there’d be freshly upturned grass in the yard again.