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Not long after my sister was born, when I was two, my parents heard that a mother fox had been killed nearby and there was a litter of fox kits. My mother bundled me up so Dad could take me to see them. Somehow, we came home with one of the kits. It’s easy to imagine a toddler me, babbling with delight over the baby foxes, and somehow also easy to imagine my father giving in to the impulse to bring one home with us. Kippy became a pet.

There was also a puppy, “my” dog, Puff. They tell me that I would shuffle around the house in my footed pajamas, Kippy hanging onto one ankle and Puff the other, growling and tugging furiously as I dragged them over the hardwood floor, laughing.

As Kippy got older, she was put away after each playtime, into a pen on the screened-in porch. One day as Mom was putting her back in the pen, Kippy bit my mom. After that, Kippy had to live in a pen in the garage, and our play times were over. When I was five, we moved to another house. Kippy did not come with us. (You knew it wasn’t going to end well, didn’t you?)

I don’t have a really conscious memory, in the usual sense, of playing with Kippy. But I know that there are feelings I have when I remember that time. Feelings of warmth, of sunlight on wood floor, and a very strong sense of play. I have an unmistakable sense of hearing a sudden noise, and all three of us turning our heads towards it. It was right and good back then to be a sensitive creature. Fox is able to remain unseen in plain view, the protector of the family. As you might suspect, I have great affinity for the fox clan.

I can’t tell you why I need wild nature, quiet places, and connection with the furred and the feathered. I only know that I do, and I need to keep remembering and honoring that, and to reject the guilt I sometimes feel over needing that as the daughter of people who never got such choices in life. I need to remember to pull myself away from the computer, the chores, the endless parade of crap that I get entangled with, my futile worrying and planning and arranging to make everything come out my way, in constant search of instant gratification or ego strokes. To get outside…out out out.

There used to be a me who had no trouble living in the here and now, a me who played with a fox and a dog, a me who was perfectly content in a perfect world.

She’s still there sometimes; I find her maybe watching a family of White-tailed Kites in a tree, or listening to the delicate sound of pelican wings overhead. She is the best part of me.