Yesterday we were met with an unpleasant surprise: The Hole had reappeared. Jonas had not, as previously hoped, taken the hint and left. No, instead, there he was, scuttling beneath the neighbor’s hedge. Aggravated, we tossed a few chunks of honeydew melon into the cage before heading out to see some friends.

When we returned home, our hopes temporarily soared — the trap had been sprung!

But it was not Jonas. It was Boris.

Boris looked a lot like Maud, only bigger, smellier, and possibly meaner. Boris was loathe to leave the trap but, after some firm encouragement, he tumbled out and scuttled down Jonas’ hole. “Are they in cahoots?” I wondered bitterly. We reset the trap with more honeydew and went to bed.

This morning, the trap sat empty as did, unfortunately, my flower pot; Jonas had removed the last leaves from the plant I had struggled to keep alive during his tenure below our porch. Discouraged, I left for my German class, sure that Jonas was destined to live as our perpetual nemesis.

And then:

At 1:41 pm, July 19, 2007, four squirrels and two possums later, Jonas plopped himself down into the trap and…pow. Now we just need to figure out what to do with him. Suggestions?

There is a new wrinkle in our groundhog saga.

Four squirrels and no groundhogs later, we have decided that Jonas saw the writing on the wall and bailed. We have not caught glimpses of him scuttling beneath the porch when we check the mail. He has ignored the veritable buffet of fruits that we have placed outside the hole and inside the trap. Most tellingly, he has not re-excavated the holes we have spitefully, partially filled. Yes, it seems that Jonas has departed.

This does not, however, mean that we are wildlife free.

When I went out to check the trap this morning, I was greeted by a creature even more despicable than a twenty pound groundhog:

This is not Jonas. This is Maud, a possum. This is uncomfortable for all involved.

It’s uncomfortable for Noel because he has a long, troubled history of vehemently loathing possums. While you may dislike possums, Noel hates possums with a kind of murderous passion. Really. It’s uncomfortable for me because I have a weird, conflicted attitude towards possums. For the first twenty years of my life, I thought opossums were cute, quirky little things that hung upside down and had cool tails. I blame this grossly erroneous conception on Bambi. After finally seeing a ‘real’ possum during my junior year at Covenant, this lovely childhood delusion crashed and burned. They’re gross. They’re really, really gross. And, of course, this is uncomfortable for Maud because, well:

Farewell, overgrown rodents. You need not return. Thanks.

As you may recall, we have a groundhog beneath our feet.

But now, oh Jonas, we’re pulling out the big guns. We brought in the Cassel-hunter and we’re blogging all the fun to be had here.

During an early childhood trip to Virginia, I saw what seemed — to me — to be the most amazing, magical vehicles. Strange contraptions of pastel plastic, the vessels glided across the calm lake, among the waterlilies and ducks, passengers pedaling leisurely. A paddleboat. What a fabulous idea. And thus began a lifelong dream of, someday, propelling one of these fantastic crafts myself.

Basically, I’m saying that I was dreaming about paddleboating for a good five years longer than I dreamed of getting married.

Noel made fun of this fascination rather mercilessly. “They’re silly,” he told me, “you can’t really steer them, it takes more energy than it’s worth, and they’re silly.” And while I silenced my praise and pleading for a while, I was hardly dissuaded.

And then, yesterday, it happened. As a (half) birthday gift, Noel took me to Forest Park and we, indeed, went paddleboating. And I had a blast. We pedaled and paddled through the Post-Dispatch Lake, under bridges, and around the fountains in the Grand Basin at the foot of Art Hill.

Noel, was, of course, correct about the unfortunate physics of paddleboating. It’s certainly not efficient and I was surprised at how quickly my legs started to feel the burn. At first I was startled. Was I so out of shape? How were these retirees across the lake doing this? Then, I realized: being married to a quick-walking, strong-thighed husband does set the bar rather high in terms of velocity. While other couples pushed their legs in languorous, smooth strokes, the Weichbrodts pedaled vigorously, finding the vessel’s peak speed and then metronomically maintaining the pace. Romantic and aerobic. We’re cool like that.

There’s a groundhog under my house.

Well, technically it’s not there at this precise moment, but, judging from the gaping hole next to my rhododendron bush, he’s been working on getting his living room in order.

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, “Wait, Elissa, don’t you live in an urban neighborhood full of concrete and cars?” And you would be correct, dear reader. And yet, a week and a half ago, while putting away my gardening tools, I saw a large rodent-like creature scamper across my backyard and scuttle into the narrow space between my neighbors’ houses. It looked something like this:

Thanks to that ubiquitous Rozerem commercial, I initially thought I had insomnia and was seeing beavers. Surely I was imagining things. Maybe it was just a brown possum. But, when Noel got home that night, he saw it too, hanging out in our backyard. Over the last week, the CREATURE — now generally identified as a groundhog — has become the source of neighborhood gossip.

Though frustratingly elusive when it comes to being captured on camera, the groundhog has appeared to almost everyone. And then, today, when I discovered the hole next to our house, I also discovered that the groundhog was not alone. “Girl,” my neighbor across the street yelled out of her window, “are you looking for those creatures? There’s two of them! One in the brush over there and one on that side of the street. Girl, they are BIG and you are small so you be careful.” Oh good, two.

I called Animal Control and was told that they don’t “do” wildlife. They directed me to the Missouri Department of Conservation who, appropriately for their name, said that they don’t “do” groundhogs unless we think it has rabies. We are, however, free to trap or hunt the beasts as we see fit.

And so here I am: on my front porch in the middle of Saint Louis, watching a groundhog and a rabbit waddle and bounce, respectively, in the empty lot across the street. Do my dreams miss me?

In my quest to re-landscape our front yard, I have been making daily morning sojourns to our neighborhood park’s mountains of mulch. One of the perks of living in University City is that they randomly provide free mulch in the community park…towering, smelly piles of woods chips and peat moss created from the byproducts of the neighborhood. Every morning I pull up in our sweet little Jetta, Schmitterling, next to the quivering heaps of organic decay, pull out our two recycling bins and a shovel, and proceed to funnel a corner of a mulch mountain into my plastic box.

I realize, of course, that I look ridiculous. Schmitty is a petite, silvery, and kind of trendy. When she parks next to the other regulars at the mulch pile — the contractors’ white pick-ups, the gardening devotee’s Forerunners, or the occasional minivan with the middle seat removed — she seems pitiably unfit to haul large quantities of gardening stuffs. The contractors and experienced gardeners pitch huge amounts of furry peat moss into their truck beds or specially dedicated army of garden buckets; I precariously toddle about with a canary yellow recycling bin loaded down with wood bits. Sometimes, they look at me sadly, wondering when I’ll realize that my Jetta has no place in the world of committed gardening.

I love Schmitterling, but sometimes, particularly when I am loading mulch into plastic containers, I wonder what life would have been like if Helga was still with us. Helga was Noel’s previous vehicle, a 1994 GMC 1500 extended cab truck, who wore her 100,000+ miles proudly. Helga was big, blue, and big. When I first started driving her, I was slightly frightened; that solid Norsewoman could take a skinny half-Japanese girl any day. Soon, though, we developed a valuable working relationship, together inspiring truck drivers throughout the greater Chattanooga area to commit double takes when they saw us.

Helga loved to cart stuff around. She carried Goodwill couches, Bagpipe issues, groceries, luggage, oversized rolls of watercolor paper, and adventurous 2nd South residents in her spacious bed. She would have liked carrying mulch for me, I think.

We’re not sure where Helga is now. The last we heard of her, she was heading south, purchased by a nice Mexican from Atlanta who planned to take her across the border for his family to use. Sometimes I worry about her; how would a northern lady take to the warmer southern climate? Though I can’t say for certain that she’s in a better place, I think she’ll be okay. I still miss her, though, especially among the mulch mountains.

“Ma’am,” he said, popping his head over my shoulder, “I just wanted to compliment you.”

I was sitting outside my coffee shop haunt — sandals off and feet propped up on another chair — reading a cultural geographer’s apology for the dynamism of space. I was not prepared for compliments.

“You,” he continued, “have beautiful feet. I haven’t seen any good feet since I moved to St. Louis, but you have beautiful ones.”

And there it was.

…

Last night during our church small group meeting we talked about the Foucauldian conception of truth and power, post-Lacanian subjectivity, and Tim Keller. I like these people.

This Friday offers a dazzling but admittedly incongruous array of social opportunities. Vote for your most outrageous combination of three.

Options include but are not limited to:

1. meeting with my adviser about my thesis project
2. attending the art history department’s grad student “happy hour,” complete with departmentally-funded booze
3. attending WashU’s first annual drag show, featuring one of my fellow Feminist Art and Criticism from 1970 to the Present classmates; she’s a drag king
4. attending my church’s ladies’ open house; there will be cheese
5. attending the opening of an Andy Warhol show

Good thing we’re Presbyterians now.