To the possum that died behind my fence

You were a very large possum. Impressive, even. How long does it take for a possum to grow that size? And what did you see during your time here on Earth? According to my Google search results, you could have been up to eleven years old. To me it hardly seems like enough time, but for you it was an entire life.

Perhaps you watched from a tree nearby when, six years ago, we renovated the house and reclaimed the yard. Maybe you were horrified when I removed the four giant ham radio antennas covered in vines and growth that the previous owner had left sitting in the back—it was probably a good hiding place. Maybe you were the one that always ran along our newly installed 8-foot wood fence and drove my dogs crazy. Do you remember me? I was the one with the flashlight. You and I had a moment a couple of months back. 

I always wondered about you; where you stayed during the day, where you went at night. Ever since that evening I caught you on the front porch, hoping to finish up the dry cat food I regularly put out for the stray orange tomcat. It was a funny moment for me; I thought the cat had finally climbed into the little bed I put under the lounge chair for him. So imagine my surprise when I bent over to look and discovered you there, crouched on top of that cute, fluffy bed in all your prehistoric glory, or repulsiveness, depending on who you ask.

I actually let out a bit of a girlie scream as I stood up, which surprised me because that isn't like me at all. But it's funny what you do in those random moments of terror. You learn something about yourself when there's no time to think, just react. Had you been any other kind of creature, I suspect you'd have overturned that lounge chair and torn a path through the flower bed in an effort to get away. But you just hunkered down and waited as I frantically ducked back inside, hyperventilating until my fear was overtaken by curiosity.

You might not know it, but I watched from the bathroom window as you left.  You poked your pointy nose out from under the lounge chair and purposefully looked both ways, like a child who'd been taught how to cross the street. You took a few cautious steps to extricate yourself from the cushions of the cat bed, then burst off the porch in a surprising display of speed. You ran faster than I ever thought you could, leaving a path of swaying phlox in your wake as you cut through the flower bed and dropped into the creek.

From then on, I thought of you every time I encountered the empty cat bowl. The tomcat never eats all his dry food since I've started spoiling him with the canned stuff, a fact that never fails to make my husband roll his eyes. Since then, I've also kept a flashlight out beside the back door and whenever the dogs would start barking, I'd go get it in hopes of catching another glimpse of you.

So it was with a deep sense of sadness that I went about disposing of your remains. But truth is, you had grown quite stinky after a couple of days and it had to be done. I assume you were hit by a car since your body was beside the road out behind our back fence, grimacing in a way that showed all of your fifty teeth. I have since learned that's the most teeth of any land mammal and it made me feel bad about my own disinclination to floss. The good news is that I only discovered your demise after finding a baby possum in the yard. One of your progeny, perhaps? A teenager, I learned, apparently looking for a territory to call his own. I suppose our yard is now free.

But the truth is, you got me thinking about dying. Maybe it's like I've heard it said—in the end we're all just meat. I will, at some point, be placed in my own equivalent of a Hefty bag and put away so as not to offend the living with the smell of my decay. And when that happens, hopefully a long time from now, I pray that like me, someone will take just a few moments to say "I remember you."