FOX IN THE YARD

The newest critter to appear in our yard here at Sewanee was a red fox, one who slinked through the yard, stealthily approached the bird bath, and surprised a fat robin just before the bird took wing. It was midday, and foxes are nocturnal, so I was surprised that it was hunting during the day. Foxes devour eggs, mice, birds, insects, frogs, lizards, berries, nuts; and this critter had a plethora of things to eat in our yard (and, no, I don’t think they like flowers, so it is one less garden predator – it isn’t among the deer, rabbits, moles, caterpillars, and, lately, slugs who have destroyed four plantings). Actually, foxes have sometimes been used to control pests in fruit orchards, eating the pests and leaving the fruit intact.

The critter in my yard was a red fox and looked much like a dog except for its muzzle and bushy tail. It was a solitary hunter, as most of them are, but wasn’t quick enough to catch its bird prey, which told me that it had been hunting most of the night and was just making a last pounce before retiring to the underbrush of our hemlock tree. I felt some trepidation about the critter being in my yard, but fox attacks on humans aren’t common, unless they’re rabid. Some of them will appear on doorsteps, and the Russian Silver Fox can be domesticated. When tamed, the fox loses its musky smell, puts its ears down like a dog and begins to wag its tail to express happiness. Stone carvings of foxes found in eastern Turkey attest to the fact that they’ve been around a long time.

My friend Vickie’s mother, who lives in Frostproof, FL, reported that a fox turned up in her backyard, and she instructed the manager of her groves to get rid of it. He brought in a few pieces of sweaty, dirty clothes and placed them over the entrance to the fox’s lair, and Vickie’s mother never saw the critter again. Evidently, they dislike the smell of humans!

As I’m a Beatrix Potter fan, I particularly liked her TALE OF MR. TOD (circa 1912) in which Mr. Tod, a sleek, sophisticated fox, is one of the principals; the other major character is Tommy Brock, a bristly badger. The story centers on the kidnapping of the Flopsy Bunnies, and Beatrix wrote the story because she said she was weary of writing “goody-goody books about nice people.” Then there’s the classic Bulrovian fairy tale about Foxy Loxy who leads Chicken Little of “The sky is falling” fame and her band of barnyard animals into his den to eat them when suddenly the sky falls on him.

There have been no cataclysmic events since the red fox appeared under the hemlock tree, and some nights when I can’t sleep, I find myself going to the kitchen window and looking out at the bird bath, searching for him. I think it was a male fox, a Reynard, and I’m curious to see it use its bushy tail (referred to as a “sweep”) to change direction quickly. The “sweep” also helps keep the fox’s feet and nose warm when it goes to sleep. I’m told that foxes often cache the food they find, but I’m not brave enough to search for hidden evidence of my fox’s midnight marauding under the hemlock.

Also, unlike the British, I’m not interested in taking up the sport of fox hunting. However, I can recall my former father-in-law packing up a half pint of whiskey and a thermos of coffee, two counteractive substances, and going into the woods around Franklinton, Louisiana, in a dilapidated van at night to hear the hounds bay while they chased foxes. He’d return at daybreak, not having seen any foxes but filled with good humor from the sound of his hounds baying and from finishing off the half pint of Jack Daniels that stimulated the fun of the sport.

Here’s the only fox snippet I’ve written, taken from my chapbook, COUNTERPOINT:

CLANDESTINE
In the lush Louisiana spring
the woman and her lover
move as starved foxes,
pointed noses jutting in the dark,
hunting wild,
doubling back on their own tracks
to confound their enemies.

TALKING TO AFRICAN VIOLETS

On the long tables in the “refectory” at St. Mary’s, Sewanee, a row of potted African violets bloom happily and brighten many breakfasts in the room overlooking the misty valley. Yesterday morning, Sister Madeleine Mary sat with us and explained why she has had such success with these house plants that bloom in a variety of colors. “You have to name them and talk to them,” she said. “For instance, this one is Ute, named after a very elegant German nun, and she likes conversation about ethereal topics. Then there’s Zita who requires some knowledge of Filipino customs and dress when you speak to her. She’s named after Sister Mary Zita here at the Convent. We mustn't forget Cindy who was named after a nun's cat and responds to purring sounds. As for Greta, she prefers a more guttural tone of conversation…and so on.”

You may think Sister Madeleine Mary has been confined to the convent too long and has become schizophrenic , but she is an expert on plant talk and maintains a healthy respect for a flower that has been cultivated by humans for hundreds of years. As the official caretaker of the African violets, her plants grow well in the light and well-regulated temp of the breakfast room, which has windows on three sides. The violets like tepid water and a room free from drafts… and enjoy stimulating conversation, Sister Madeleine insists. I noticed one wilting plant, and Sister said that she had bloomed too profusely when she overheard visitors to the Convent ridiculing the idea that plants understand human language.

Actually, a lot of research continues to be done about plants responding to sound, including wind vibrations that often rasp against the windows of the breakfast room. Music, according to one writer, should be played at 70 decibels, the level of a normal conversation. However, some experts claim that 92 decibels is required, and plants have responded to heavy metal music very well, often growing rapidly after hearing the raucous noises. Sister Madeleine probably plays some of the canticles composed by Hildegard of Bingen, but who knows, she could be a fan of Led Zeppelin!

A German professor Gustav Fechner, who wrote SOUL LIFE OF PLANTS, touted the efficacy of conversing with plants and believed that plants do react very well to environmental stimuli – conversation, music, wind sounds...even Prince Charles of England talks to his plants and advocates speaking to them in an encouraging manner. Of course, there’s no scientific evidence that talk helps plants, but lots of botanists believe in this theory. Luther Burbank, the potato grower, believed that plants could understand the meaning of speech through a form of telepathy. The theory is that talking moves the air around a plant and gives out carbon dioxide to aid in rapid transpiration rates the plants needs for growth. However, when you stand close and make sweet noises to your favorite house plants, don’t expect them to answer back.

I imagine Sister Madeleine’s African violets respond to the constant prayer resonating in the atmosphere of the Convent, but… I thought I heard strains of an English drinking song just before we entered the breakfast room the other day.

DIXIELAND REVISITED

Fifty years ago, I stood on the porch of “The Old Kentucky Home” (“Dixieland” in LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL), the boyhood home of Thomas Wolfe where his mother, Julia Wolfe, kept a boardinghouse until the 40’s and about which Tom wrote in his voluminous novel, LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL. At the time I stood on the porch, the old home was closed for the week-end, and rain fell steadily as I peered through the glass windows fronting the porch of the yellow frame boardinghouse, wishing I could go inside and roam through the twenty-nine high-ceilinged rooms. Feeling forlorn, I turned away and vowed to come back one day when “The Old Kentucky Home” was open to the public.

This past week-end, I entered the restored boardinghouse on a tour guided by an employee with the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources and got my “literary fix” as we moved through the rooms that Wolfe immortalized, complete with handsome pieces of furniture that once belonged to the Wolfe family. I was able to view the room where his brother Ben died, a large room on the second floor with a bay window and stained glass and the large dining room with numerous tables set with linen cloth and china for over 30 boarders who sought hospitality from Mrs. Wolfe during the early 1900’s. A lot of memories of the old home have been kept alive through Wolfe’s novels, “the spectral images of the people he had loved, who had loved him, whom he had known and lost,” Wolfe wrote in LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL.

Thomas Wolfe was brazenly autobiographical in his writings, and his boyhood in the old boardinghouse at 48 Spruce Street plays a major part in his reminiscences which were so overtly realistic that he could not return to the public library in Asheville for seven years after LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL appeared in print. Of course, Asheville now lays claim to the famous novelist, and the Thomas Wolfe Memorial is a house museum of which the city proudly boasts. It houses exhibits, an audiovisual program that features Thomas Wolfe’s life, and a gift shop that sells all of Wolfe’s books. I had to purchase at least one of the books and a few postcards featuring rooms in the old home.

On the tour I learned that LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL has never gone out of print since its publication in 1929. I remember reading it in the late 50’s and being taken with the poetic prose and Wolfe’s abilities as a commentator about social ills, particularly those in the South. I bought YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN because I wanted to read about the censure that surrounded Wolfe when he went home to Asheville after seven years. It’s reported that Ella Winter, a guest at a dinner party in New York City that Wolfe attended, provided Wolfe with the title for this book. When she learned that Wolfe had returned to Asheville after his seven year absence, she said, “But don’t you know you can’t go home again?” Wolfe’s way of returning home was to write about that experience.

The manuscript of YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN is reputed to have filled an eight-foot high packing crate, and inside of that crate were thirty-five notebooks, enough to fill three books, that portrayed America and Europe as nations at the edge of collapse. Wolfe wrote about the social problems and economic injustices that prevailed in America and Europe but at the conclusion of YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN, he sounds a note of hope: “I believe that we are lost here in America but I believe we shall be found.”

That message of optimism was written in 1937-38, and I wonder what Thomas Wolfe would say about those nations today?