It was still dark when I let the dog out this morning for a quick piddle. Yes, I may not have to be up before the crack of dawn these days – but Prince Fluff the Magnificent demands his chicken slurry lickable treat most mornings at about 6 AM and will loudly meow, paw the bedroom door and if in the bedroom – stomp heavily over the pillow until I get up and give it to him. Pulling the covers over my head does not work – he will only paw at the sheet and blankets and meow even louder. So – roll out, start the water for tea, measure out a scoop of Wagh Bakri International blend, open the lickable and squirt it out into Prince’s dish – and usually Benjamin the dog begins fussing at the door to be let out, by this time.

But this morning, when I opened the front door – which actually opens onto the narrow side yard of my house – I spotted something small, pale-furred and somewhat rodent-like scurrying briskly away. Benjamin paid only brief attention and didn’t chase after it – he really had to pee, I presume. The rodent-like thing moved off in the direction of the back yard and the empty field beyond. Not a field rat, or a skunk – both of which I have seen in my yard – but a juvenile opossum, about the size of a half-grown cat. And I have seen opossums in and around my yard; they move in a very distinct manner.

I am thinking that the opossum must have come to feast on the nectarines; they are ripe now and falling off the tree that I bought at Costco and planted by the front gate some years ago. This will be the second year that I have gotten a good showing of fruit from it, but alas, most of them are nibbled at by squirrels or knocked down by the wind before I can get much from them. Anyway, something has been eating the ripe and fallen fruit – so the only thing that really surprised me was that Benjamin didn’t have any interest in chasing it.

Then again – opossums do have teeth. Lots of them, and all very sharp. The cats who used to hang out in my back garden wisely didn’t have any problem with the large specimen whom I nicknamed Wellington (for the nose) who used to visit and nosh from the dish of dry kibble that I put out for them.

And then there were the four opossum kits who lived in the wisteria vine which had grown up over my back porch some years ago. One day when I was lying on the porch swing, reading a book, the kits climbed purposefully down the vine and one of them clambered up onto the end of the porch swing. I held very still, mostly because I wanted to see what it was going to do. What it wanted to do, apparently, was to hop up onto my lap and tentatively gum at a fold of my blouse, the edge of the book that I was reading, and at my fingers; not very hard, just sort of sampling for a taste, which apparently was not rewarded. Discovering that none of the above were in the least edible, the opossum kit climbed down again and vanished into the garden with the others. There may have been a double-dog-dare challenge invoked by one of the other kits. Anyway, when I related this encounter to my next-door neighbor, a retired civil servant some ten or fifteen years older than me, she confessed that if a ratty little creature with a bald tail and sharp little teeth had climbed up into her own lap, she would have been screaming still.

Anyway – they also eat garden slugs as well as fruit, so I’m actually rather glad to see them again.

This may be one of the kits, later – and all grown up