I think Nature is a mean Mother. A leering, spiteful perpetrator of nastiness aforethought. How else to explain the three cases-in-point below?
Case 1. Sweet Little Helpless and Hapless Baby Bunnies
We had a female rabbit living under our deck. A pretty cottontail who, for easier entry and exit, courteously gnawed the merest amount of material from just one diamond-shaped opening in the deck's latticed skirting. I'd see her from time to time—in broad daylight, no less—sitting or lying in our backyard. Sometimes the wind would swirl her thick fur as if to punch the last bit of breath from me with her beauty.
Then came the day my son was scattering clumps of poorly mulched grass after mowing the lawn, and accidentally raked away the clump emplaced by momma rabbit to conceal her nest—a shallow circular depression smack dab in the middle of the yard. Daniel looked down and saw a half dozen squirming baby bunnies, bald and blind. Susan and I hurried out to behold their inexcusable preciousness before he reconstructed the covering as best he could.
It started raining a few hours later, rained all night, and was still raining when I checked the nest the next day, fearing the babies might be flooded. They seemed okay, but I called animal control anyway and was told no worries, mate: Rabbits commonly situate nests in open areas; the mothers never come around during the day; if the babies get too wet she'll move them.
Well! All well and good. Nature knows best. The three of us felt enormously relieved—until about noon the following day, when I looked out the kitchen window and saw a huge, brown, frigging cat hunched over the nest and blatantly polishing off a fresh-meat meal.
Now, I ask you. Wasn't it a nasty bit of business on Mother Nature's part to make mother bunnies plant baby bunnies out in the open—and leave them unattended from sunup to sundown with nothing more than a thatch of grass for protection? Especially when sturdy wooden decks featuring predator-resistant skirting stand thirty feet away? I mean, that's just mean.
Case 2. Our Dog's Bottomless Pit
I am one-hundred percent certain I could kill our dog by ripping open a 25 pound bag of Kibbles 'n Bits, spilling it all over the floor, and saying "Bon appetit." Our dog seems innately unable to register, much less obey, a message of fullness emanating from her tummy zone. She would eat until her insides explode, I'm convinced, and with no discernible diminution of speed or urgency right up to detonation. What is the deal with that? How come our dog's eating-light glows eternally green? And listen, this is more than theoretical: She got hold of a large loaf of discarded cornbread one time and ate until she collapsed. Wiring her brain like that strikes me as kinda mean. Even gorging lions have the sense to push away from the table and leave a little carcass for the hyenas.
Case 3. Romantic Love Between Human Males and Females
Permit me to tell it like it is: Men equate romantic love with yee-haw love; women equate it with cuddle love. And each expects the other not only to supply the brand of romantic love desired—both regularly and profusely—but to really, really want to. Could anything be rigged more effectively for failure?
I rest my case.
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Here's a quote from an Alice Munro story called Meneseteung. It sums up rather nicely the enchanted effect my wife has had on my existence in the world of things:
A man may keep his house decent, but he will never—if he is a proper man—do much to decorate it. Marriage forces him to live with more ornament as well as sentiment, and it protects him, also, from the extremities of his own nature—from a frigid parsimony or a luxuriant sloth, from squalor, and from excessive sleeping or reading, drinking, smoking, or freethinking.
To set the record straight, I do not smoke, nor do I excessively sleep (would that I could). I am not consciously parsimonious. I drink hardly at all, read voraciously, and am most definitely susceptible to protracted bouts of freethinking. I find much to like, too, in the concept of luxuriant sloth.
Left to my own devices, as Ms. Munro notes, I will keep a place decent, but won't do much to decorate it. The dishes will get washed, the bed made, the toilet scrubbed, the socks picked up from the floor. But the walls and various horizontal surfaces will remain, for the most part, unadorned.
So, yes, for the 34 years I've been married to Susan I have indeed lived amidst "more ornament as well as sentiment" than would otherwise have been the case. But Susan in no wise has forced these conditions upon me. She has just gone about doing what she does, which is to say casually and instinctively shaping our surroundings into an ever more lovely home.
Everywhere I look I see and relish her graceful hand, feeling privileged to dwell in a world of her creation.
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I saw a middle-aged couple in the lobby. The lady wore a black floral print skirt, charcoal hose, and a cream-colored sleeveless top. Her hair, a blond dye job, was arranged in a loose French twist, and her skin looked leathery and lightly tanned. The man was about six inches taller than she. His left hand and wrist were encased in a funky elastic bandage resembling a fingerless glove, and he was wearing horn-rimmed glasses, grayish-brown slacks, and a cranberry polo shirt. His straight brown hair was shiny-slick with some kind of preparation. After a short while, the woman and man turned to move elsewhere; in doing this, he grabbed her arm and jerked her toward the direction he had in mind, as one might roughly redirect a child who'd already been scolded twice that evening.
At the ballet on Saturday night ...
someone sitting near me was broadcasting the camphoraceous smell of moth balls.
At the ballet on Saturday night ...
the heavy velvet curtain continued lowering long after touching the stage, its vertical pleats forming a chorus-line of red and wrinkled elephants' legs.
At the ballet on Saturday night ...
I saw a teenage couple in the lobby. The young man wore a gray shirt with button-down collars and a striped tie. He had a floppy mop of sandy hair and a meager mustache and goatee. The glowing young woman clinging to him had tawny skin, darting eyes, and shimmering shoulder-length hair the color of Godiva chocolate. Her spaghetti-strapped crimson sheath plunged deep below her waist in back and confirmed the absence of panties with form-hugging chutzpah. Turning toward Susan, I nodded in their direction and said, "That boy doesn't have a chance."
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