From Rus in Urbe Backyard Buck: On Coyote Patrol

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

[Columnist Paul Clark fashioned Rus in Urbe: Country in the City from his family’s one-acre suburban lawn, turning it into a wilderness retreat for them and their neighboring wild creatures.]

At our place in Virginia, our backyard deer have their fawns the last two weeks of May. Not coincidentally, our ever-present but seldom seen coyotes show up in greater numbers the first two weeks of May.

At Random: Infiltrator

By Paul Clark
(aka motomynd)

The deer accept me as their own,
rest easy an arm’s reach away.
They welcome me into the nursery thicket,
protecting them as the new are born.

They trust me,
think they know my mind,
but I’m an infiltrator,
I used to hunt their kind.

Goines On: The turtle snaps

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Goines returned to the big green electrical box where he had seen the turtle two hours earlier, right before he texted George its precise location. He had not heard from George, and Goines was apprehensive what he would find this time. There had been that tractor clearing brush, so there was even the possibility the turtle might have been….

Goines On: Nightmare

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Goines seemed to have to race his electric toothbrush to cover an entire quadrant before the device’s 30-second beep. He supposed that perceived time was very slow this morning because he had gone deep into dreamland in the hour or two before arising. His psyche probably couldn’t have delivered the quartet of dreams any other way than by sedating him – otherwise he would have woken himself up to escape them.

Goines On: Housing development

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Goines took his morning walk into the adjacent housing development to the south, where Mrs. Goines loved to walk because of its openness and the interest of its road paving and housing construction. Its clubhouse and pool were the first construction site he came to, only a couple of hundred yards in. The building looked almost finished, though only a small fraction of the development’s projected 400+ dwellings had been constructed and moved into. Perhaps the first home-buyers had been promised a clubhouse soon?