Now, if I had any sense of the fitness of things, I’d save this story for February 2, which is not only Groundhog Day, it is also the birthday of the Grandma involved.
Alas, I am not that organized, and so, you get a story about hibernating groundhogs on the second-to-last day of August.
In the 1950s, when my mom and her siblings were little kids, my grandparents lived with Grandpa’s family on a farm in Ohio. The house was a pretty standard rural farmhouse from all indications. A bit primitive, but solid and capable of more or less squeezing everybody in. Sure, you had to chase hens out of the outhouse before you took a whizz, but if you kept your sense of humor about things, it worked reasonably well.
This farmhouse had a cellar which was dug deep into the clay soil, and kept a steady temperature, the better to store potatoes, carrots, and the like. It had an outside door, one of those slanted things sheathed in tin that children like to try to slide down.
One fall, when Grandpa was stowing that year’s crop of root vegetables, an enterprising woodchuck sneaked in while the door was open. Later, Grandma went down for some vegetables and spotted the woodchuck bumbling around the perimeter of the room. She decided to try to capture it in a bucket and then take it back outside, but the wily woodchuck would have none of that. In an unexpected burst of speed, the woodchuck rocketed across the cellar floor and dove for cover beneath the Furnace.
The Furnace was one of those turn-of-the-century coal-fired behemoths that made more noise than heat. It took up half of the cellar and presided over its domain as a capricious and inefficient dictator.
Grandma, being a woman of intelligence and resourcefulness, used a broom to try to prod the woodchuck out into the open. Nothing doing. The woodchuck was so well sequestered beneath the furnace that he was either inaccessible or else he had gotten cocky and knew there was no reason to dislodge himself other than personal preference.
Grandma gave up for the night, assuming the woodchuck would come out the next day, when the commotion was passed and he got hungry. Then, she’d have another go with the bucket.
The woodchuck did not resurface the next day, nor the day after that. The woodchuck didn’t come back out for a week, then two. Grandma figured that the poor thing had starved and died beneath the furnace and was bracing herself for a powerful stench. The cellar continued to not smell of decaying woodchuck. Grandpa opined that that woodchuck had settled himself in for a damn comfortable hibernation, and Grandma resigned herself to waiting him out.
Sure enough, the next spring, Grandma found the woodchuck, dazed and skinny, trying to excavate a tunnel to freedom in one corner of the cellar. In his post-hibernation torpor, the woodchuck was much easier to capture. Or perhaps he just sensibly realized that he had to be captured to be freed. In any event, the woodchuck was removed from the cellar and they all went along their separate, happy ways.
The. End.
“The Furnace was one of those turn-of-the-century coal-fired behemoths that made more noise than heat. It took up half of the cellar and presided over its domain as a capricious and inefficient dictator.” One of the best paragraphs I’ve ever read on the internet. Love it.
Thanks! I’m glad it tickled you.