Ode to the Guide

I saw a groundhog.

It was maybe 5 months ago, and a warm light lingered in the evening hours. Its brown scramble into the street led the thing directly in front of me–a backpacked wanderer tucked neatly into this suburb, which is itself folded squarely into the hills south of the city. The two of us, we watched our shadows stretching, watched cars blur silently by, and still, we stood.

Seconds later it was gone. Through a cleft in the hedge, or under a bent branch, I suppose. It never mattered where the thing was headed.

My other groundhog memories will envy this one, because not one of the dozens of hogs I chased away from our garden last summer was memorable. There is not one of them for whom I can say, “If you had only seen the look in its eyes…” or “What a creature….”

That Autumn afternoon, though, I was looking for something. Searching hard for it, and having no luck. I needed the answer to this unaskable question, and finally, dust settling, it was you: a brown mass I half-expected to speak strictly in portmanteau.

Here, so many months later, I expect you have met your maker, or are shivering these harsh weeks away underground. Really, I don’t care. It never mattered where you were going. Only that you found me first.