Chapter 9: Thanksgiving
and Coons
Time rolled on and the
Holidays were around the corner. For the Katz’s it started with Thanksgiving
and continued into December with Hanukkah and then New Years.
Thanksgiving Day was always
something that they looked forward to. Sometimes extended family would come and
visit; sometimes they would go visit them. This year nobody could make it out to
visit until December, and with the animals, the Katz’s couldn’t really go
anywhere for too long. As a result, they invited the Batcherlys and David and
Rose over, but they each had their own kids in town and declined. They also
invited Justin and his family, and surprisingly they did come.
Justin’s mom was a very
petite bubbly blonde and she liked to talk. Her name was Carol. She kept up a
pretty steady stream of comments and conversation from the moment she walked in
the door. It seemed to be a nervous sort of chatter, but since Karen wasn’t
very talkative herself, it worked out fine. Justin’s dad, Matt, by contrast, was
extremely taciturn and hardly said a thing the whole night. Johnathan had a
hard time trying to be sociable because the man seemed to speak in grunts. He
was polite enough, but just didn’t seem to want to talk. He did thank them for
taking care of Justin so many days, and for the meal, but that was about the
extent of it. You could tell he spent most of his time outdoors because his
skin was tan and weathered and he had the hands of a guy who did a lot of
manual labor. He was a big guy too. Justin seemed thrilled to have both of his
parents present and finally meeting the Katz’s.
Predictably, during the
evening the topic of homeschooling came up. Justin’s mom asked, “So, how does
that work?” Karen suppressed an urge to roll her eyes. When that question came
up, and it always did, she was torn between the short answer and the long
answer. The short answer was that things varied day by day with everyone
working on their own set of schoolwork and projects, but especially when they
were back in Raleigh, they could just have easily been out all day on various
field trips and social excursions. The truth is, there is no easy answer to,
‘How does it work?” because it is different for each family and there are as
many different answers as there are families.
Justin’s mom was merely
curious, as anyone who never seriously considered homeschooling as an option would
be. After all, the status quo is to send your kids to the “experts” all day
almost every day to “be educated”. When most people find someone who doesn’t do
that, they are either forced to rethink those assumptions or write the
homeschooling family off as somehow odd or delinquent. Unfortunately, the
later reaction was by far the most common and Karen was glad that Justin’s mom
was at least willing to ask about it before judging. She actually seemed to be a
bit fascinated, but in the end came away with another typical response, “Well,
you must be very good because I could never do that.”
Karen could have cited
various studies and statistics, but she restrained herself. Her degrees and
history as a teacher seemed to validate their lifestyle to people, though if
anyone had asked her, she would have said that those things had sometimes held
her back. Being a teacher had trained her to expect that kids should work a
particular way and follow a certain rigid path. She had learned with her own
kids, sometimes the hard way, that each child was different and needed
different ways of learning and different speeds for things. Little Joe was almost
reading already while Jack had been a late bloomer. Jack had never been pushed
on it and so never had to struggle with the idea that he wasn’t measuring up.
When his brain was ready, finally, to read at the age of 8, he just did it. To
be sure, Karen had privately worried, but she had faith in him and he had
eventually gotten there. It’s hard to explain these things to people who have
never gone off the beaten path, and so Karen kept all of this to herself.
The meal was the typical
traditional American Thanksgiving fare. There was a turkey, bought from a local
ranch, sweet potatoes, cranberries, rolls, stuffing, salad and green beans.
Karen and Sarah had spent most of the day in the kitchen, with a little bit of
help from Johnathan and Jack, and they had prepared a ton of food. It was so much
food, in fact, that they had to serve themselves buffet style. It wouldn’t all
fit on the table with the extra people. It also got so steamy in the house that
they had to open some windows for some air. If you had been an opossum outside
the house, you would have been able to hear the hubhub of all those voices from
the far end of the yard. It was a good evening, if a little tense, but Karen
was happy to have finally met Justin’s parents.
That evening they also
learned that they needed some raccoon-proof trash cans. At two in the morning after
everyone had gone to bed exhausted, there was a huge crash on the backside of
the house. Johnathan got up and tentatively peeked outside with a flashlight to
see four pairs of beady mammalian eyes glaring back at him. They hissed and ran
off, but left behind a huge mess of turkey carcass and vegetable bits all over
the grass, and two overturned bins.
The next day he ordered a
set of “raccoon proof” trash cans
from a specialty store online, and they couldn’t arrive too soon. Once those
raccoons had found out what good food could be found in those cans, they were
back every single night until the Katz’s finally decided to keep their trash
inside for a bit. For example, when Johnathan bungeed the lids on, those pirates chewed
through the industrial strength plastic of the bins, and that was after
knocking them over first. They were nothing if not persistent.
When the new bins finally
did come, the raccoons spent a week attempting every night to open them up, but having
no luck, finally went elsewhere. It was none too soon either, because everyone
was getting rather tired of being awoken every night with some sort of huge bang
or crash. Any noise, of course, set Snitch off and the racket was unbearable.
Snitch had started to behave erratically. He was on high alert and clearly not
sleeping well. He walked around whining and following in everyone’s footsteps
all day. He looked and sounded like he was going to have a nervous breakdown. When those
pesky raccoons finally did leave, they all heaved an internal sign of relief and
Snitch finally started to relax. Karen had thought she was about to go mad
between the touchy whiny tired kids and the whiney touchy tired dog. She was an
animal lover, but she was ready to go out and shoot those robbers if they
didn’t stop.
The chickens had also become
a lot less adventuresome. Between the cooler weather and the marauding raccoons,
they stayed close to the coop, and Jack was very careful to lock them in at
night. Even then, once the raccoons had given up on the trash, they did attempt
to crack the chicken coop, and though they didn’t get in, they did find and
take off with several eggs that had been left in odd spots. The goats also were
edgy, though they had less to fear. It was a good thing they had a nice shed to
go to at night and there wasn’t really anything in the shed the raccoons
wanted. Goat was a bit big for their typical menu anyway.
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