Hope Is a Raccoon Learning to Swim

What frightened little raccoons taught me about belonging and the sound that means it’s safe to come down.

It’s possible to be surrounded by people who love you and still feel terribly alone. I know because there are days when I can feel the distance growing between me and everything I hold dear, even though no one has gone anywhere. I watch it happen in slow motion, wanting to call everyone back, wanting to ask them to stay, without knowing how to explain that the distance I’m afraid of is one they can’t see.

My ADHD takes me on journeys I never agreed to, and anxiety knows how to make even the most familiar places feel strange. It tells me I’m too much to live with and somehow not enough to be loved, then files the complaint before I can ask what evidence it has. I can know those thoughts are untrue and still feel their weight. A shadow can fall across something precious without taking the precious thing away, but when I’m standing inside it, I sometimes forget that the light is still there.

Then I peek around the door in the morning, and Ezra sees me. He is one year old, and the joy that crosses his face has nothing to do with whether I managed to keep my thoughts in order yesterday or whether I remembered every task I meant to finish. I opened a door, and the person he was hoping to see appeared on the other side. For him, that’s enough to make the morning wonderful, and for a moment I get to see myself the way he sees me.

In the middle of the night, my daughter climbs into bed with me because she feels safe there. At breakfast she thanks me for her strawberries, smiling as though I have given her some extraordinary gift instead of the fruit she was already going to get because feeding your children is generally expected. My husband reaches for my shoulder in his sleep, and sometimes I lie there thinking about how his hand found me when he wasn’t even awake enough to know I needed it. In daylight, he gives up a chance to go play in the woods so he can work on one of the strange projects I have been talking about, because he heard what mattered to me somewhere in the middle of all my words.

My bonus son has a mind so much like mine that I think he understands some of my mistakes before I have finished making them. Putting feelings into words is hard for him sometimes, but when I do something ridiculous, he laughs with the relief of someone who knows he could’ve done it too. The laughter reaches me before any reassurance could.

And Odin, who has been asked more times than I can count to stop lying behind my office chair, returns to that exact spot as soon as I look away. I could interpret this as a troubling lack of respect for basic workplace safety, but his fluffy body has made its preference clear: wherever I am is where he wants to be. These moments are small, and anxiety is loud, and sometimes I have to wait for the light to move before I can see what has been beside me the whole time.

Perhaps that’s why I couldn’t stop thinking about the baby raccoons at Woodside Wildlife Rescue in Mississippi. I have always maintained that my brain is governed by raccoons, so I was prepared to enjoy a story about raccoon boot camp, but I wasn’t prepared for how much I would feel for the little creatures who arrived there after losing the one who was supposed to teach them how to live.

Some of the kits are sick or injured, and others have been separated from their mothers by storms, traffic accidents and the ordinary dangers of a wild life. The rescuers look for their mothers and try to put the families back together when they can. When they can’t, founder Paula Woodside, rescue director Raquel Priest and the people working alongside them begin the slow, tender business of teaching the kits what they still need to know.

They hide worms beneath the dirt so little paws can learn to find them. They open pine cones and acorns to show the raccoons that food is waiting inside. They let the kits practice fishing in shallow pools, then take them out to the pond and encourage them to swim. In the woods, a trilling call means danger, and the raccoons scramble up the trees; a short whistle means the danger has passed and they can come down.

The Associated Press described the kits discovering a new food, then running to show it to their caregivers before hurrying back to keep the other raccoons from stealing it. That detail undid me a little. Their mother is gone, the world is larger and more dangerous than they know, and still there is someone they want to run toward when they find something good.

There’s sorrow in this story too, because care can’t save every kit. The staff hold a ceremony for the raccoons they lose, and then they go back to the ones who are still hungry, still frightened and still learning. They can’t make the woods harmless, but they can give a small creature another day to grow strong enough to enter them.

After months of care, the kits who are ready get a graduation ceremony. The rescuers play “Pomp and Circumstance,” read their names aloud and release them into a forested part of the property. I keep picturing the people standing there as the raccoons turn away, watching the little lives they’ve fed and worried over disappear among the trees. They taught them to go, and when that day finally comes, they celebrate.

I recognize something in the frightened part of me that needs to hear the whistle before it can climb down. On the days when my mind tells me I have drifted too far from love, it helps to notice where love has been all along: smiling at me from a crib when I open the door, thanking me for strawberries, laughing at a mistake, finding my shoulder in sleep and stubbornly settling behind my chair.

The shadows don’t vanish because I’ve noticed these things. They may be there again tomorrow, lying across the very people I know are near. But the sun moves, and sometimes all it takes is one face lighting up at the sight of mine to show me what the shadow was hiding.

Somewhere in Mississippi, a rescued raccoon hears a whistle and knows it can come down from the tree. Someone stayed long enough to teach it that sound, and when I think about that, I remember how much hope can live in the simple promise that when fear sends us climbing, love will still be there when we’re ready to come down.

If this story brought a little warmth into your week, you can leave a little extra love here:

Your kindness helps us keep going, looking closely, and bringing the hopeful things we find back to share with you. There’s never any obligation, we’re just glad to have you all along for the ride.