Wine and Wildlife

It was a sultry afternoon in a Diamond Bar backyard. Edda Gahm's daughter was being treated for cancer, making her mother her caretaker and fellow hostage to the dreaded disease.

There isn't much I could do other than be there, try to provide the normalcy of friendship when life is anything but. We silently prayed this chapter would come to a better conclusion than it did in the end. 

So it was that once a week I would come over just to chat over a couple glasses of wine. This particular afternoon turned out to be our last for this particular ritual.

The afternoon heat was melting into the cooling evening breeze. Our patio chairs are on the back deck, mine pointed in the direction of where there is an opening in the oak trees across the boulevard.

My friend poured us each a glass of pinot grigio. We are catching up on the news of the week, enjoying the sun setting and listening to the last call of the birds before they turn in for the night.

I’m watching out across the canyon at the hawks nesting, straining to see if Bambi and his deer family will make an appearance. 

My friend's voice stops mid-sentence. I look to see her staring under my chair. Her face is wearing is that look of mild terror. Her eyes grown so large that I think they may pop out of her head. I hold my breath and look to my boot-shod feet.

Holding my breath turns out to be exactly the right thing to have done. A baby skunk decided I and my chair would make a nice bridge to pass under.

I sit very, very still. I will myself not to scream or panic myself in to a bigger problem.  There were no more thoughts of what wildlife might be in the distance.

As the wild cousin to the house-cat with the distinctive stripe waddled ever so slowly towards the fence and freedom, I learned that baby gatos el stinko are quite cute.  Up close, their fur is fluffy and appears more gray than black.

Go ahead and laugh. Humor is when it happens to someone else.