encounter, and a dream

I went outside to bury kitchen scraps in the compost pile, and there was a sudden scuffling through leaves nearby. Three possums. One ran past me and slipped through a fence gap, the other two retreated behind a tree and just stared, mouths open, when I approached slowly for a closer look (I didn't get closer than twenty feet). I suspect they were getting food out of my compost pile. They looked plump and thickly furred. My plastic bin is rucked up on one side and buckled, near where I have an old stump sitting- it's handy to place the container of scraps on while I dig a hole in the pile. I had thought the bin side was mussed up from contents shifting and settling where the ground has a lower spot? but now I think probably the possums were trying to get into it. I don't mind skinks living under my compost pile, or birds and squirrels picking through the top of it, but I draw the line at possums!

I'm going to simply quit adding stuff to this particular bin for the rest of winter. Between the worm bin inside and the metal can under the deck (which I haven't added to yet this season) I have enough other space to compost in. Without food there for a while I hope the possums will look elsewhere- and in spring when stuff heats up it will decompose faster which might avoid attracting them again? Or I need to fashion a lid for my bin, or get a new container that shuts out the animals better.

The deer have been through my yard, I found their droppings. And a pair of foxes- I found their footprints and saw two trotting right down the middle of the street in front of the house the other day. Beautiful thick coats but one had a skinny tail. And one day last week I saw a large bird sitting at the base of a tree in the rain, poking under the flaking bark. It was brown speckled with a red patch on the back of the head and a black crescent under the throat. A northern flicker! I don't remember seeing one so close before.

~

Dream from a few days ago. I'm visiting- or living in- my mother's house, my husband and kids are here too. I go out to the backyard and see something astounding: in a row along the wall of a gray shipping container shed in the back of the yard, tall lush plants have sprung up overnight from seeds I planted just a day ago. They have thick, straight stems, wide flat leaves like sunflowers, and incredibly large hanging flowers like brugmansia- solid pink with speckled throats. The plants tower to the top of the shed and the flowers nod alternating on each side of the stem. I stare, then turn and yell into the house: "Come quick, you have to see this! It's my hollyhocks, they're as big as S. is tall!" (my youngest). The flowers weren't really four feet each, more like two, and obviously not hollyhocks but that's what I call them in the dream, without a blink.

My family comes outside and we crowd around the huge, beautiful flowers. Then I look in the gray metal shed- it's new, empty and clean with a long workbench along one wall, shallow shelving, windows across one side up at the ceiling, propped open for the breeze. I look around thinking what a nice garden shed this would make, if I could build a greenhouse off one side of it to collect heat from the metal wall rising as the sun goes down . . . .