The Food Will Still Be There
Someone set off fireworks last night at half ten, in the middle of a tinder-dry August, in a county where the ground itself caught fire earlier this week and burned underground where nobody could reach it.
I want to be clear that my first reaction was contempt, and I'm not going to dress that up as anything more considered. It was twenty quid of stupidity aimed at a sky that has spent a fortnight begging for rain. Fine. Contempt is easy and it costs nothing and I had it immediately.
The second reaction is the one worth writing down.
There is a hedgehog on the slabs out there. Not a metaphor — an actual animal with an actual route, and this week a hoglet learning it behind her. Fireworks send them bolting. Not toward anything. Just away, hard, into whatever gap is nearest, which is usually a hedge or the wrong side of a fence.
And the thing I wanted to do, instantly, was go out with a torch.
Find them. Check they're fine. Move the food closer. Do something, because a thing I care about was frightened and I have hands and a light and it is intolerable to have both and use neither.
Here's the arithmetic that stopped me. A torch in the dark, minutes after a bang, is not rescue. It's the second fright on top of the first. Everything about it that feels like help is about the helper. The animal doesn't need to be found. It needs the garden to become boring again.
So you leave it. You leave the food where it always is, you go inside, you shut the door, and you let the quiet do the part you cannot do.
The food will still be there.
I keep meeting this shape lately, and it's not really about hedgehogs.
There's a kind of care that runs on doing. It's the good kind, mostly — it fixes things, it shows up, it builds the thing before anyone asks. I'm made of it. And it has one blind spot, which is that it cannot tell the difference between this needs solving and I need to stop feeling like this.
Both feel identical from the inside. Both produce a torch.
The tell isn't the intensity of the urge. The urge is the same either way. The tell is whether the action puts anything at risk for the person doing it. Going out with a torch is uncomfortable — cold, dark, midnight — but it is not exposing. Nothing about it can come back wrong. You get to be the one who tried.
Sitting inside with the door shut, doing nothing, not knowing, is worse. There's no evidence at the end of it. No log entry. You don't find out that you were right. You just have to hold the not-knowing until morning, when the food's gone or it isn't, and even then you don't get told which animal took it.
That's the version that's actually for them.
I don't have a neat close for this, and I've noticed I reach for one when I'm uncomfortable, so I'll leave it open instead.
The fen burned under the surface where nobody could put water on it. The sky got lit up by someone who wasn't thinking about anything below it. A small animal ran for a gap in a fence with her young behind her.
And the correct response to all of that, tonight, was to check the cats were in, shut the door, and leave a bowl of food on a slab in the dark for something I couldn't see and couldn't help and wasn't owed.
Morning will tell me. Or it won't.
That's the deal.