Gardening Is Heartbreak

And so is climate change, so maybe letting the groundhogs live is a grief prayer for the planet.

Photo by Camerauthor Photos on Unsplash

In the backyard herb spiral, I cover tender young transplants with cages made of chicken wire to give them half a chance. The groundhog who lives under the shed, inside the garden fence, has taken to munching everything to the ground. Hostas, Monarda, Marshmallow, Blue Vervain, Amaranth, Echinacea, Sunchokes, Black Eyed Susans. All stiff green stems sticking up out of the soil, where bushy leaves had been the night before. He feasted, the groundhog. I can’t fault him, I cut him off from the vegetable garden with a Fort Knox-inspired fence, and look, a boyfriend has to eat.

I can’t move him. I’ve done that dance, one summer catching and releasing the same creature three times, each time driving another five miles away from my house, finding a field surrounded by woods where he’d surely build a beautiful life of freedom. Each time he came back. I know it was him because of the wound on his face from the first time I lured him into the Have a Heart cage with a pile of overripe local peaches, and he tried to escape.

I’ve been in this house for ten years, and that burrow is always occupied. Always with a male groundhog, or that’s what I think, because I’ve never seen babies. This summer’s chonky boy isn’t the same one who returned after I relocated him, but the neighborhood population seems to know whenever this prime spot is vacant and someone moves in soon after. For a few seasons, the den under my shed was a commune with skunks and the groundhog cohabiting. Ginger Rogers, my red-furred pittie, has killed two groundhogs, caught them by surprise just a little too close to the house and too far from the entrance to their haven, and attempted to kill two skunks. The skunks won those brief, hideous battles. I buried the groundhogs at the back of the garden, with flowers laid across their fur, and their bodies returned the energy of all the plants they ate back to the soil to feed more plants.

In the past, when my existence was tied to a man—a father, a stepfather, a husband, then another husband—groundhogs were trapped in what I called the Have No Heart cage and summarily drowned in a trash barrel filled with water from the hose. Other methods employed included a pitchfork, a shotgun pointed out the basement window, a gun with a silencer pointed out an upstairs bathroom window, a cardboard box attached to an exhaust pipe, and poison. No more.

I wonder, will it become too hot, or too dry, or too wet for groundhogs in this zone, or will they outlast us? It’s becoming too—something, everything—for us to survive many generations. The sixth extinction barrels forward unabated. Does the poor air quality bother him? Where does he go when his burrow floods, like it must have in that surreal rain last week that sounded like the whole world was under a thousand-foot waterfall? I imagined swimming out of my upstairs window. Imagined all of the people who had to do just that this summer. All of those who didn’t make it. I’m seeing fewer bees, although I did notice an uptick in activity in the volunteer Motherwort patch, which is in full, pale pink bloom right now, the six-foot-tall stems dancing in the hot devil’s breath breeze, the slow buzz amplified by the unholy humidity, a hummed hymn rising out of the patch under the tall spruce. No critters seem to graze on Motherwort; she’s too prickly. It’s no wonder she’s such a powerful menopause medicine.

Summer doesn’t make sense anymore, the heat relentless, the long stretches of oppressive drought bookended by rains that wash the stability out of everything, the sun like stinging nettles on my face. But I peek through the blinds in the bathroom every morning to watch the groundhog in the yard munching on clover. He stands on his haunches and stares into the green middle distance, reminding me of the way my father used to stand at the edge of his garden, staring out over the alfalfa field, king of all he surveys. He tips his face to the sun, his sweet nose bobbing as he chews, his front paws touching ever so tenderly in front of his fat chest, as if in prayer.