Going About Our Lives

Our neighbor Cory hailed me in the yard recently, and we met for a chat on our adjoining lawns.

     “Public service announcement,” he said.  “New digging by the lilac bushes suggests groundhog or skunk activity between our back yards.”

     I waited for the public-service portion of the program.  Cory, who recognizes cluelessness when he sees it, spelled it out for me.

     “So you might want to keep an eye out for them when you and Rascal come through the yard.”

     I thanked him for the heads-up, and we shared the hope the critter would turn out to be a groundhog.  “There was one on the deck this morning,” I told him, “Maybe that’s all it is.”

     A couple days later, Cory phoned with another PSA. 

     “We just saw a coyote out back,” he said.  “It’s moved through four back yards so far, and was last seen heading your way.”  He didn’t have to explain the implications this time.

     My sweetheart, my sister Marilyn, and I were gathered at the breakfast table, which overlooks the back yard, when this PSA landed.  Sure enough, there in another neighbor’s yard was a coyote.  Marilyn lives across from one of Ohio’s state parks.  She hears coyotes all the time and sees them periodically, but she gasped right along with us.

     The coyote out back was not what any of us expected.  No mangy-looking undernourished canid, this.  This specimen was big, with sleek dark fur.  It looked well fed.  Most of all, it looked wild and ill at ease.  My husband described it up by saying the animal looked anxious, as if it were trying to find its way out of all these yards.

     Shortly after the coyote sighting and an unrelated trip to the ER for my sweetheart, he and I left Marilyn and Rascal at our house and set off for parts north.  As in Up North, the land of birch trees and pines.  We met his sisters and a couple daughters at a cottage along Lake Huron between Tawas and Oscoda, the family’s favorite stretch of Great Lakes beach.

     We’d stayed at the cottage another year, but only the address was recognizable.  The place has been completely redone, and every change is an improvement.  It used to have a bedroom accessible only through a bathroom.  Not only is that now a thing of the past, the whole cottage has become luxurious.  We loved it and Lake Huron and, most of all, the company.  My honey’s sisters are wonderful people, and it’s been too long since we’d seen them.

     The only real downside to our stay was that my husband developed Covid.  Neither of us had had it before but, alas, he seems to have been exposed during his ER visit.  He had a mild case, fortunately, and seemed to enjoy his new duck voice as much as the rest of us did.  I, of course, got Covid too, when we got home.  My case was also mild, but lacked the duck-voice coomponent.

     He’s recovered, but it’s taking me a while to get my energy back, given that the Covid showed up on the heels of my pneumonia.  And something else has knocked us both for a loop:  the deaths of three of our neighbors.  Two of the deaths were even on the same day.

     We live on a court.  It’s a close-knit little community where everyone knows everyone else.  The loss of any person is a shock.  Losing one person in each of three different households in a two-week span is unthinkable.

     What’s worse for us is that one of the three was a close friend, Todd, of our wine-and-cheese group.  The usual three couples had gotten together recently, and I already had a cookbook out and open to the recipe I’d planned to make for the next party.  There won’t be another party with everyone there.  Todd, the lean, active, mountain-biking, wilderness-hiking embodiment of fitness, fell over dead at home.

     The fact of his death still comes as a shock every day.  It’s what I think of when I open my eyes in the morning.  The day after Todd died, my husband said that his own first thought was, “Yup.  Todd’s still dead.”

     This morning was the funeral mass for Dave, who died the same day Todd did.  Hundreds of people came, there was an orchestra, a choir, and a cantor, and the recessional was “God Bless America.”  So.  That’s one service down, and two memorial services to go.  They’re not until next month, though.  Here’s hoping the list doesn’t grow.  We neighbors prefer to see each other at home, going about our lives.

2 October 2025