Tag: Groundhog Day

A Dream of Spring

The woodchuck was stumped. 

She had decided to write a strongly worded letter to the person in charge. In her opinion, there was nothing more persuasive than writing carefully chosen verbiage that laid out exactly what an idiot the person reading it was; in impeccable penmanship, of course. She just couldn’t get past the salutation.

Dear Weasel was succinct, but it didn’t seem forceful enough; a little too polite. She wanted something cutting and insulting right up at the top, but the only modifier she could think of to put in front of Weasel was weasely. It worked as both a noun and an adjective.

She tried pacing around her burrow, but it was very crowded and she kept trodding on tails. Anxious creatures had slipped into the warm tunnel looking for comfort, and now there was snoring in a variety of minor keys. She didn’t see Shirley, but she assumed her cousin was asleep somewhere under a pile of squirrels.

Earlier that week, she had told Shirley the situation above ground was getting more tense by the day. The weasel had put a cow in charge of the ferrets, and he was as small-minded as he was tiny. 

“I’ve known a lot of cows,” said Shirley, “and they are sweet and mostly kind. Are you sure?”

“Well, I heard it was a bovine, so I guess so –probably it was a dude bull who was insecure because of its small . . .”

“. . . dictionary says a castrated bull is a steer,” interrupted Shirley. 

“Whatever, he’s gone now. Saw what the ferrets did and disappeared.
They are still getting their orders from the dog-killer, but now they are all dressing like members of the Toon Patrol with tiny helmets and machine guns.”

That had been a few days ago, and the Roger Rabbit cosplay had been the trigger for the letter she was trying to write. 

Shirley entire body suddenly plummeted down the entrance hole and landed in heap on the burrow floor.

“What are doing up there?!” gasped the woodchuck “I thought you were asleep under that scurry of squirrels with the fringe on the top.”

Shirley looked ashen and the woodchuck was suddenly afraid, instantly regretting the Oklahoma! joke. “What happened?”

“They’ve killed Kevin,” whispered Shirley. “The ferrets insisted it was a hawk, but this was no bird attack—I know what that looks like. The weasel’s goons did this on purpose.”

Next to Shirley, Kevin was the cousin she was most fond of—he had succeeded her as Punxsutawney Phil when she (almost voluntarily) retired. The woodchuck hadn’t seen him in a few days but assumed he was on his way to Gobbler’s Knob to participate in the February 2nd holiday.

The guttural scream that rose up from deep inside the woodchuck held every bit of fear, grief and rage she had been holding inside for the past year. It ricocheted off the walls of the extensive network of tunnels that ran under the meadow and coursed through the veins of the earth as a bloodcurdling message to all who were still asleep. Wake up! it shrieked; you cannot pretend this is not your fight!

She took a deep shuddery breath and looked up—a hundred glowing eyes stared back at her. Every woodland creature who had been dozing seconds ago was now awake.

“Everyone listen up. We are all going to write letters and tell them this must end. We are going to make phone calls and tell them how much we hate this. And we are going to be in the meadow marching and filming and yelling non-stop. Hibernation is over —if we don’t get to sleep, they don’t get to sleep. I know you’re tired and hungry— we’re supposed to have six more weeks before the alarm goes off. But use that hangry feeling to tell the others to wake up!”

As news of Kevin’s death spread through the burrows, the animals seem to coalesce into one united group. They were all different species, shapes and sizes; some even on the wrong end of the food chain with their new partners. But thoughts of eating each other were put aside for the moment as they grasped paws and vowed to fight back against the destruction of the meadow.

The woodchuck pulled Shirley aside and told her she must be the leader of this group of rebels now. “Not me,” she protested. “You’re the one that got them all fired up.”

The woodchuck shook her head, “I am leaving. I have to get to Punxsutawney by Feb. 2 so the Mayor can lift me up to talk to the people. It’s the biggest crowd I’ll ever be in front of and I have to take advantage of the platform. I have to do this for Kevin.”

“You know, PETA is trying to replace you with a hologram because they think it’s animal abuse for Pennsylvania to take advantage of you like this,” Shirley commented thoughtfully.

“I don’t care what he thinks about this; if I can put up with the mayor’s freezing cold hands shoved up my ass, it’s none of his business. Besides, I was always Team Gale.”

“No, that’s The Hunger Games. This is different— PETA stands for People for Ethical . . .”

“It’s not different — it feels like the beginning of the book where they have taken control of all the districts, and I am suddenly the tribute from District Twelve!”

She hugged Shirley and set off on her journey. She knew the general public was only interested in one message from her—that this hellish winter would finally end and that early spring was right around the corner. The woodchuck knew that wasn’t true—there was always six more weeks of winter, sometimes even eight or ten. But it would end eventually; that’s what she would tell them. They could outlast the weasels of the world, but only if they worked together. 

Spring would come. It would be hard work, and there would be many setbacks; but it would come. The Dream of Spring was alive.

• • •

Don’t let the fear that you’re not doing enough paralyze you into doing nothing. You may not have a platform like the woodchuck’s, but you can still make a phone call or get a whistle. The woodchuck’s Dream of Spring is that one day soon she can go back to writing about cicadas and eclipses.

• • •

The woodchuck has a new burrow! You can still hang around here with the other woodland animals, but the iguanas and the platypus have moved over to Substack, where they hope to reach millions of new readers and possibly amass a fortune in cicadas! (The woodchuck doesn’t really expect you to hand over your tasty bugs—she’s just hoping for new eyes to read about her adventures.) Look for her at The Blind Woodchuck on Substack.

Part Two: The Dark Side of the Moon

She wasn’t really blind, of course. A slight singeing and some minimal scarring occurred in her beady black pupils, but that faded quickly. Shirley came every day and bathed her eyes with the juice of assorted berries, which turned them blue for a while. She thought it looked striking but her cousin sniffed and said it reminded her of one of those pale-eyed husky wolves.

More surprising was the outpouring of concern among the forest creatures. A steady stream of delicious leaves and bugs were left outside her burrow so she wouldn’t exhaust herself hunting for food. Get Well Soon! messages scratched into bark were dropped into her hole and she amused herself by sorting them into a scrapbook with the sincerest words at the front. The woodchuck beamed as concerned rodents came from all over the forest to check on her. She had never felt so beloved.

One day while she was out healing in the sun, she accidentally reached out with a lighting fast reflex and caught a grasshopper. It became obvious that she wasn’t sight-impaired and no longer need help. The attention stopped. The other animals had their own checklists to accomplish before winter set in, such as bulking up for hibernation and not getting eaten by hawks.

The woodchuck was not ready to let go of the scam. There is an old saying in the forest: once a narcissus, always a narcissus (animals have far more old sayings than most humans realize). Someone had whittled a long white stick that was the perfect height to use as a cane, so she perched the wire-rimmed sunglasses the guilty marmoset had left for her on the tip of her nose and felt her way around the forest. She knew she looked regal as she worked her way around, waving and tapping, until she realized it also alerted hawks to her presence. 

The whole thing became considerably less entertaining when someone dropped a flyer down her burrow. It was a picture of the current weasel in charge in 2017, the one who liked to wear a severed fox tail on his head; he was staring up at the sun and pointing. Someone had scrawled moron across the picture. They were laughing at her.

She became reclusive and angry. The woodchuck had never been a particularly social animal but now she shunned the other creatures. She showed up late to work, bit the Mayor of Punxsutawney and lost her job as the weather groundhog. She said hateful things about the beavers, about grabbing them whenever she wanted and laughing at how she could do whatever she wanted because she was famous. She meant it ironically because her fame had become an albatross around her neck, but the beavers were still hurt by the comment. The woodchuck also wished she could get that damn bird to leave her alone. 

Even Shirley, her most faithful and loyal cousin, had had enough. “So you made a mistake,” she said, “it was an extraordinary natural phenomena and none of us were ready. The eclipse glasses hadn’t come in yet and how were we to know how stupid it was to stare?” Shirley did not add that she knew enough not to but had enough sense not to mention it.

Cancel culture was real. Humiliated, she stayed in her burrow as much as possible and spent her days watching reality television on her phone. Love is Blind was her favorite. She began grinding her teeth at night, although that proved to be a good thing because it kept her incisors from growing through the roof of her mouth.

Hibernation came as a relief, because for six blissful months she could tune out the rest of the cruel forest and simply dream about being pursued by marmots and not think about the state of the world. As time passed, the weasel with the orange fox tail on his head was inexplicably still around, and she couldn’t help but feel this was all his fault. Perhaps if she had had better guidance, she wouldn’t have stared at the stupid sun. (She also had nightmare about the Love is Blind reunion and woke up in the middle of February wondering why they hadn’t spent more time talking to Chelsea, but was eventually able to fall back asleep.)

Seven years had gone by, a very long time in the short span of a groundhog’s life. And now here she was again, unprepared, with the sky flipping the script and the weird half-moon shadows flickering over the grass. She recalled what Shirley used to say to her: “Those who cannot not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” which was a pretty compelling statement for a groundhog. Actually, it might have been a lyric from a Carlos Santana song, but that wasn’t the point.

What mattered is that she alone had the power to take back her life—only she could change the course of her own history.

She grabbed her tiny sunglasses and turned to face the dark.

Coming soon: A Total Eclipse of the Heart

Piece on Earth, Part (Pizzeria) Due*

The woodchuck roamed restlessly about her burrow, picking up and putting down a tiny Statue of Liberty, her souvenir of that remarkable whirlwind trip to New York. She had assumed she would go back into hibernation when she returned, but her mind kept replaying that weekend and dreams of her evening with the infamous Pizza Rat kept jolting her awake, sweaty and panting. Then she had to get up to pee and could not get back to sleep.

It didn’t help that her most hated holiday was approaching. She had once been the most famous groundhog in the world, her weather predictions anxiously awaited by millions as a guide as to how much longer they would need to wear mittens. Local news shows had loved her; she’d been interviewed by Anderson Cooper. 

But the town of Punxsutawney had grown tired of her ever-increasing green room demands and she had been unceremoniously dumped as the rodent meteorologist. The green M&M things had been a joke! Now her cousin Kevin was cosplaying as her and no one seemed to notice or care. Someone told her he had been doing shots with Anderson and Andy Cohen on NYE. She had blown the best gig of her life and now she was alone and sad and probably had six more weeks of winter ahead (she would check on February 2nd, but there was always six more weeks of winter ahead).

Scrolling through her phone, she stopped cold at a headline on the New York Times site. She’d been vaguely aware of a lot of buzz about a rodent silhouette captured in concrete, but she gasped when she saw the newspaper of record writing breathless prose about it. Could this be her Pizza Rat? She exhaled as she realized this had happened in Chicago, not New York, but then a whole fantasy bloomed in her mind: what if he had come to visit her and a steamroller had flattened him? She’d seen enough cartoons to know that happened all the time. Her meadow was not that far from Chicago, and he might have thought it was close to her burrow. New Yorkers seemed to think any place outside their city was all kind of mushed together with no interesting architecture.

The woodchuck felt an overwhelming need to see the rathole for herself; she was convinced that it was him, and now she must either be proved wrong or mourn the greatest love of her life. 

The trip across the frozen prairie was fast; she serpentined from burrow to burrow, keeping a practiced eye out for hawks. Once she reached the city, she was surprised at the number of available ratholes there were to duck into for cover. The woodchuck wouldn’t normally have thought to share this underground subway system with them, but she felt they were kindred spirits now, sharing the pain of the Unknown Squashed Rat and possibly the mingling of inter species DNA.

There was a crowd gathered on the sidewalk where she knew the imprint to be, and she hid under a parked car. Flowers were placed in the snow around it and people holding candles made keening noises and rocked back and forth. What the hell was going on? Why would humans be mourning this rat? She had passed hundreds of yellow signs in alleys on the way there that shouted Target: Rats! with a large red canceled sign over a picture of a rodent. She would never understand human beings.

She strained to get a look at the impression lodged in the concrete. The angle was weird because of where she was hiding, and it was hard to tell how big it was. If all those people hadn’t been standing around it weeping, she could have laid down on top of it and that would have told her for sure. Even though Pizza Rat was a giant among rodents, she still outweighed him by several pounds.

Looking at the imprint gave her a terrible feeling. She couldn’t be completely certain, but the rush of grief she felt made her believe that this was her once in a lifetime love. She turned away, fighting back tears, too upset to gaze upon the shallow grave of her doomed future.

Suddenly the air was filled with shouts of horror, and she looked up to see a giant rat running across the street dragging a slice of pizza. It was him! He had come to find her! She had just enough time to register that the piece was from a Chicago deep dish pie instead of a foldable New York slice, when a huge SUV came barreling down the street, the driver talking excitedly on her phone and waving in the direction of the imprint. The car hit the famous rodent and he flew across the street, landing face down in the cement of a new sidewalk being poured. The woodchuck screamed and covered her eyes.

A moment later, she peeked around a tire, certain that she would see a new rat imprint; a paw reaching out to her, anguished expression on his snout as if he were Han Solo being encased in carbonite. But no! He was alive! He had surfed across the wet cement surface on the pizza and landed on the grass. The only thing in the new sidewalk was an imprint of ‘za.

The crowd parted in respect or fear and watched as the giant rodent dragged the concrete coated pizza over to the original fallen rat. He placed it gently near the candles and other odd objects left in memoriam. Then he limped over to the parked car where his lover of another species hid, grabbing a piece of cheese someone had left on the sidewalk. He paused for a moment and then angrily shook his tiny paw at the crowd who had mocked the grave of this brother rat by taking selfies and getting married in front of it. They ran screaming in all directions.

The woodchuck waited for him, her blushing cheeks as red as the berries that would bloom on the soon to leaf out mulberry trees, welcoming spring with its warm breezes and long sunny days filled with bees and butterflies and love.

She was gonna get laid tonight.

*For our non-Chicago rat lovers, Pizzeria Uno boasts it invented deep dish pizza in 1943; and Pizzeria Due was opened to handle the overflow from Uno.

The woodchuck does not have a preference, as she eats mostly grass and bugs.

PunxsutawnEmeritus

The alarm blared in the middle of the night, and the blind woodchuck groaned and batted at the screen until it stopped shrieking. It was very dark and cozy in the burrow and she dreaded the thought of rousing herself enough to even roll over. Waking up early from hibernation was a bitch. 

She shivered a bit at the cloud of cold air that was hovering just above her DIY down quilt— a bunch of ducks had molted right outside the entrance to her burrow, and she had gathered all the loose feathers into a plastic bag that had been blowing around the meadow. The tote of downy discarded plumage had kept her toasty for the past few months and made getting up all that more difficult. The bag had a weird smiley face on the side that kind of creeped her out, but she tried to ignore it. Sometimes it felt like the eyes followed her.

She pushed the blanket aside to finally get up when a sudden realization struck her: this was February 2, her busiest workday of the year, but now she remembered that something had changed. She flopped back in the dirt and a huge smile, bigger than the one on the plastic bag quilt, crossed her face. She had set the alarm out of habit but now she could ignore it. She had retired!

No more waking up at dark o’clock to get to Punxsutawney in time for the big reveal, especially during an ice storm; no more being groped by clueless mayors with freezing cold hands as they tried to hoist her into the air or feeling guilty about the bag of Snickers she had consumed that made the hoisting more difficult. And best of all, since it was almost impossible to tell woodchucks apart, she would still get the snaps for doing a great job! 

When she had made the decision to leave the Official Groundhog Predictor position, she had been uncertain if it was the right choice. (It had actually not been her choice at all, since she had overslept, missed last year’s ceremony and been replaced by her cousin Kevin; but she was very good at bending the story to flatter herself and had come to believe her version was the truth. She could even visualize the fantasy retirement party the town had thrown her, although they had been too cheap to get her a gold watch; she got a stick instead.)

She snuggled deeper into her maniacally grinning sleeping bag and thought about all the things she would do now that the unencumbered time stretched endlessly before her. Maybe she would write a screenplay; a blockbuster film that would replace that other movie about groundhogs that had become synonymous with doing the same thing over and over again. She hated that people assumed her days were an endless loop of sleeping and eating and then sleeping, although she had to admit it had been an apt metaphor for watching the House repeatedly not voting for Kevin McCarthy for five days in a row.

Maybe she would write a biopic about what it was like to carry the responsibility of predicting spring on her shoulders all these years, how the world had counted on her to use her shadowy skills to let them know when it would be warm enough to wear a tube top. She was exactly the right rodent to write this film. Maybe they could even get Bill Murray to be in it again, although this time he would be the one with the mayor’s hand up his ass! She chortled to herself and thought she would get right on that, just as soon as she slept for another three months.

The Blind Woodchuck is correct; February is the best month to sleep through.