Looking out my backdoor: To dream the Impossumable Dream

To jump start a new year and top off my week, we had a puzzling close encounter of the impossible kind. Lola The Dog chased down an adult opossum. It might have dropped out of the avocado tree. Lola was beside herself with dog joy.

Lola has a good measure of hunter in her parentage. She’s brought me birds and lizards of various shades. But this is a biggie.

She proudly deposited her gift at my feet, tail wagging like ‘copter blades. Good dog. There it lay, dead. I’d never seen an adult ‘possum up close. The strong jaws! The teeth! “Shark” came to mind.

I gingerly picked it up the hairy package with the naked tail and plunked it in the tall blue garbage can and banged down the lid, just in case.

Later, I heard scrabbling sounds from over that way. Lifted the lid. The dead ‘possum had moved. The beast had been playing possum.

What was I to do? One of the men would surely be by later to help so I turned my attention elsewhere.

I like working jigsaw puzzles. Back in early autumn I ordered four new jigsaw puzzles from the Ordering Place, you know, the one we all use, name starts with “A.” I worked a puzzle Christmas week. Decided New Year’s week to tackle another. Puzzling is not an Olympic Sport to me. I come and go at it in small doses.

However, the second puzzle I selected, a rainy day scene in a Parisian flower market, is gray. It’s all gray. Shades and variations of gray. Gray. Rain. Fog. Stone buildings. Eiffel Tower a shadow in the distance. Gray. With soggy flowers huddled in one corner.

Reluctantly, I have to give up my bragging rights about my amazing ability to work puzzles according to gradations of color. I’m good. I like to start with the sky because it is easiest. The corner with the cluster of flowers in pots? Not so easy. But fun. Generally.

When I’m laying out the thousand bits of cardboard, if two are still attached to one another, I separate them. (I don’t cheat at solitaire either.) I want to drag out the fun, milk every drop of satisfaction from arranging tiny chunks of cardboard into a painting.

So I figure maybe a gray puzzle is a good thing, despite the hit to my pride. I mean, that’s what I figured until I spent a day putting together a mere sixteen pieces. If I ever finish, I may take oil paints and give the hazy foggy gray sky some color. That’s where I started, the sky.

And the pieces seem to have only about six shapes. All of them. That means that pieces that seem to fit beautifully, and they do, they fit, are not meant to be locked together.

After tearing hanks of my own hair out in frustration, I went outside and picked tomatoes.

That’s another puzzlement. My bucket garden, the one I figured I put to rest until spring, meaning February. I’ve accepted that I’ll have perpetual tomatoes. I’m not complaining. But I admit I am puzzled.

And puzzled not just by tomatoes. I ate a lot of green beans last summer. They are easy growers. I cleverly moved the buckets next to my clothesline posts so I no longer had to tie the creepers to bamboo sticks. After a while, tired of green beans, I let the beans go brown and harvested dry beans for seed. One day a whole new bean shoot climbed up the pole and suddenly I’m eating green beans again, simply because they are there. Well, what would you do?

And what is this nonsense with the zucchini? In October, in hopes of one more crop, especially since invasive bugs took out my last crop, I planted four seeds. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. Suddenly, after two months of lying dormant, poor timing if you ask me, four zucchini plants shot up. Will they? Won’t they? It’s a puzzle.

Yes, the puzzle. I mathematically deduced that I may finish that hazy and most irritating jigsaw puzzle February 23 at my present number of pieces per day. February, in time to replant my buckets, except for the tomatoes and green beans, which are perpetual.

I may give the rainy-scene puzzle to Lola The Dog to chew on.

My puzzling garden has convinced me that life wants to live.

Ah, yes, life. Fortunately, Leo showed up, took my not-so-dead ‘possum out to a distant corn field and watched it scramble away through the weeds.

Like I said, life wants to live, even when it seems impossumable.

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Sondra Ashton grew up in Harlem but spent most of her adult life out of state. She returned to see the Hi-Line with a perspective of delight. After several years back in Harlem, Ashton is seeking new experiences in Etzatlan, Mexico. Once a Montanan, always. Read Ashton’s essays and other work at http://montanatumbleweed.blogspot.com/. Email [email protected].