The hill is just steep enough in the front yard that, come snow, you can get a little momentum on a sled. You’ll veer straight into the road, where, barring a car pummeling over you at speeds higher than the sign on the telephone pole suggests, you can see the Mercer Building in the distance. The Mercer Building is the tallest building in the state; from the thirty-fifth floor, you can see clear through Downtown Louisville. Looking past the sprawling expressway, the chaos of Spaghetti Junction to the east and the icon of Churchill Downs to the south. Beyond Old Louisville and the Victorian homes-turned-apartment-segments is the Ohio river, sourced from the Alleghany and Monongahela Rivers in Pennsylvania. That’s what I keep in mind now, in Wooster, three-hundred miles of cornfield and forest northeast from the small one-bedroom on South 6th Street.
Author: Emilee McCubbins
Baby Raccoons
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.
It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane
It’s a chipmunk. Honestly, I thought it was just a baby squirrel. It’s markings are a little weird, but Wooster is known for its black squirrels–who’s to say there aren’t miniature versions of brown squirrels with little racing stripes down the back? He’s been hanging out outside my dorm for two weeks now, scurrying back and forth between the door and my window. Not causing any sort of trouble. I’d heard of chipmunks, of course, but had never actually seen one in person. They look surprisingly different than the Simon, Alvin, and Theodore I’m used to. Sitting on my bed, my elbows trained on the window sill, I watch him dart back and forth with no clear goal in mind. He stops for a second, sniffs a bit of glass that’s found itself shattered in the bushes, and takes off again. Only took a bit of Googling–Ohio critter, rodent with stripes, looks like squirrel but isn’t–to figure out what I had been questioning for the bulk of the semester.
goldenrod & going in circles
I’m a sucker for a good goldenrod plant. The bright yellow inevitably pops against the color of the surrounding foliage in a way that you only start really appreciating once you start looking for it everywhere you go. You see it everywhere in Ohio; it’s not an uncommon plant. Still, I always get a pang of nostalgia for days spent rummaging in the woods behind my aunt Terry’s house and coming across the weed-like plant. At Johnson’s Woods, there are a handful peeking out just by the entrance before you walk into a sea of green. (Green leaves, brown bark, blue piece of gum stuck to the trunk of a tree.) The colors inside Johnson’s Woods are stunning, of course–looking up at the tops of trees towering over my mere 5’7″ frame makes me feel small in the awe-inspiring way only particularly cool bits of nature can. But the flowers are what have stuck with me.
The flowers, and the graffiti. The standard initials were annoying at first, but as I began collecting notes of the more outrageous comments, a simple “KW + ER” was the least of my concern. Some had returned to mark out their partners names in the ultimate statement of a broken heart. On one tree, someone etched “Van Halen” in big bold font. Another had taken the time to write out “Will you be my bitch?” in an attempt at what I can only imagine to be romance. Worse yet, one tree featured a carefully carved swastika. It just makes me wonder what could possibly be going through folks’ minds–white supremacy isn’t exactly an easy topic to fully grasp, sure, but who took the time and effort to etch “Kansas” into a beech with no context? Why did someone find it pressing enough to write “lemon” into a tree, to be left there for future guests to find? Why vandalize a tree at all–what do you gain, other than a few splinters? We all want to make our mark–but is here really the place? Is anywhere really the place when the outcome is just a blow to the natural landscape? Where do we draw the line?
Lowry Fountain
It’s not quite September, but the fountain has already been turned off for the year. Instead of a waterfall cascading from the overhang behind Lowry Center, the “fountain” is now little more than a puddle of leaves and muck, reeking of stagnant water and Natural Lite. On mid-July nights, when you’re seemingly the only one left on campus, this is the perfect place to sit and watch the stars; there aren’t many, but compared to Louisville, this is easily the darkest night you’ve ever seen. On those nights, when the fountain is still spewing water, the fountain almost seems natural–except for the stray McDonald’s bags and crumpled paper tossed on the ground leading up to it. For now, though, it’s been turned off. The authenticity waivers a bit without the constant stream of water, but really, you’re sitting behind a college student union alternating between watching the leaves swirl in the water and the notifications that pop up on your phone. It’s not exactly nature–but it’s a decent fake.