Foxes of Pennsylvania,
your days seem numbered, at least on Old Kennett Road. (I am out in the country writing by the way, not having an elaborate nature hallucination in Brooklyn). I saw the vixen dead last week and two more little ones this weekend. She'd been poking her head around the bend in the road so many times--I'd seen her for months on the drive from the train station in Wilmington. Hovering by the road, sometimes dashing out of the trees. I never saw one before, actually. My grandfather used to sometimes drive me out in his little Celica to watch the foxhunts in Unionville but I only ever saw the horses and hounds. I never caught a glimpse of the fox. They hide.
Starting with her, though, I've now been seeing foxes regularly. It's weird & upsetting & it feels like it should be someone's job to pay attention to this but I don't think that is happening.
I'm absorbing the changes in this place that have happened since my childhood in my little stay out in Chester County this summer. You never, ever saw a deer--maybe twice by the time I was fourteen and left home. Now of course they are everywhere, overpopulated. This is old news; just drive slowly during their mating season in the fall.
On Friday, however, on my walk with the dog through our little park next to the highway, I saw two groundhogs (like fat spastic teenage boys at the arcade, running clumsily away), seven rabbits, and a turtle (popular with the dog). I never saw any of these growing up--they have nowhere to go now because the mcmansions keep coming and coming. So the creatures are now in the yard, they're on the playground, the driveway. How many mcmansions can you build? It's the most repellent thing. Fucking golf pants motherfuckers. I was going to go see the Wyeth show at the Art Museum tomorrow but I am bailing because it is too depressing. Chester County uses his landscapes and art as a tourist pull as they sell the landscape to golfers and Hummer drivers and parents of trophy anorexics.
The beauty of the landscape here is intertwined with everything in me. I was pissed off for a long time at how fast they can destroy something gorgeous. This summer, though, I think I'm letting go of it as it disappears. I've left and come back here and it's gone more each time I'm back--I think I am ready to really let it go and know there isn't anything to come back to, not in earthly everyday reality, at least, here. It's as real to return in my imagination.
While I'm here for the next couple months though, I intend to hold tight to the line from "Barons of Suburbia": piecing a potion to combat your poison. It is generally good for the writing for me to be pissed of in a deep way and hence not everyday-crabby way.