MERRY XMAS FROM THE SMANK FAMILY —Bunty, Brock, Brittni, Brocky and Bibi
Happy Holidays to our loved ones! Bless you all, Mazel Tov and Namaste (we are fully inclusive of the faiths of all our loved ones, and special greeting to Philip, our mailman—‘Sup, Homie!) Our family goal for 2020 is: Compassion. In such turbulent times, we urge all of you to consider making this your goal, as well.
While we remain grateful for all the Universe has given us, we did have a few teeny bumps in the road this year. We had to fire our cleaning lady, Juanita, because she was just spending too much time crying on the phone to relatives trapped in detention centers on the border; it was becoming unprofessional. Bunty decided it was best to let Juanita go deal with her personal issues full time. On that note, we are so proud of little Bibi (9) , whose class at school is selling despair-colored bracelets to raise awareness of the plight of immigrants. The bracelets are $1 at school, but our little entrepreneur is charging $5 apiece, plus shipping, and all funds will go toward Bibi’s continued efforts to raise awareness. Because, compassion.
Brocky (12) had a bit of a kerfuffle on the Elite League lacrosse team this year. Brocky’s coaches chose to keep Brocky on the bench for most of the season, citing “safety concerns,” as Brocky’s time on the field seemed, oddly, to coincide with injuries on both teams. We were, however, very concerned about Brocky’s self esteem, and asked Brock Sr.’s fraternity brother, Chuck, a criminal psychiatrist at the Southeastern Alabama Correctional Facility, to write a letter explaining that Brocky needed more playing time at the risk of damaging his fragile adolescent psyche. Brocky’s coach ended up quitting; what a blessing Brock Sr. was there to pick up the slack! The Universe gives you what you need.
We’re currently suing Brittni’s last school, Tower Oaks, for emotional damages, after Brittni’s third report card of straight F’s, including a long paragraph from the headmaster alleging Brittni “used abusive language to faculty and staff, was vicious to other students, stole, was caught vaping, and engaged in lascivious contact with a custodian.” (Other girls have always been jealous of Brittni, and the custodian in question served our nation in Vietnam.) As we explain in our lawsuit, Tower Oaks failed to meet Brittni’s needs or adequately understand her learning style, her temperament, her need for safe spaces, her sex addiction, her nicotine treatment program, her anger issues, or her undiagnosed Tourette’s syndrome. Brittni (16) will be transferring to Precious Snowflake Academy, her sixth high school in three years—we are continually disappointed by the lack of commitment, dedication and skill among today’s educators. We are hopeful that Precious Snowflake will be able to provide what Brittni needs.
Sadly, our purebred Bhutanese Blue Longhair cat, Binky, has gone to the Spirit World. After Binky developed a urination problem linked to anxiety from being declawed and shaved weekly, we decided it was a wonderful opportunity to teach the children about survival of the fittest. Brock smeared Binky with bacon grease and left tied him to a tree in the woods at night, resulting in Binky’s completely natural death by predator. Brocky retrieved Binky’s collar—it’s now green and red!—to hang on our solstice tree as a reminder of the beautiful efficiency of nature.
Bunty still suffers from Acute Systematic Holistic Elasticism (A.S.Hol. E.) Syndrome, which she bears bravely. So rare and little understood is this syndrome that even physicians are woefully uninformed about it, so Bunty relies completely on her Facebook group for fellow sufferers, which is a lifeline. Bunty continues to lead her Spin class at the Country Club, runs four miles daily with our Pitty-Poos, Bo and Babs, and meets daily with her personal yogi, Sukie, but her health condition renders her completely unable to work, do household chores, buy groceries, take part in the school auction, drive carpools, chaperone field trips, sell raffle tickets for the lacrosse team, host book group, contribute to the neighborhood cleanup, or give rides to our housebound neighbor, Mrs. Shenkenpepper. Bunty is also now being treated for PTSD after being vindictively cast out of the Country Club Heights Episcopal Church following a wee bit confusion over use of funds from the Homeless Teen fund drive.
Our family, ever mindful of the needs of our planet, is on a cultivated artisanal locavore sustainably nurtured free-range veal based diet, which is shipped in four times weekly from Amazon in a compostable box made of repurposed llama droppings and seaweed. We care deeply about our planet’s future, and avoid shopping at local stores, as they tend to use a lot of plastic. We highly recommend you do the same.
This year was an exciting year for house projects: we finally completed our addition for the kids’ Virtual Game room annex, eliminating the rest of our pesky back yard! Our neighbors in the back— as Brock says, it’s just bad luck that we landed in a neighborhood of really narrow-minded people, again—are always at us with the zoning regulations, blah blah blah—sometimes it seems like we don’t live in a free country! We finally got all the trees cut down—that busybody Mrs. Shenkenpepper reported us to the city for cutting down what was, apparently, the 300 year old Shady Oak after which our neighborhood, Shady Oak Grove, was named (who knew!). As Brock says, if a person can’t cut down a big ugly tree to save on his lawnmower blades, we might as well be living in Cuba. We also completed our third floor addition, bringing—you guessed it!—another lawsuit from the people behind us, the McGregors, who claim we’ve blocked all the sun from their vegetable patch, and since they’re trying to live off the land, we’ve “interfered with their livelihood.” But we’re not counter-suing for harassment at this time because: compassion.
Brock changed jobs this year after being a victim of corporate bullying, including sexual harassment (#Brock Too) and reverse racism. It’s hard to be the only Woke person in your office; here’s hoping his next job appreciates his special talents and experience. Brock will be identifying as an African-American woman during job interviews. He is looking for C-suite management opportunities if anyone has any leads.
We hope you and all of yours have a year as blessed and full of love, light, joy, community, and, above all….Compassion. Be well. Bunty, Brock, Brittni, Brocky, Bibi, Bo and Babs Smank, with a spirit world salute from Binky.
Thursday, November 7, 2019
Sunday, March 31, 2019
Four Gifts From a Dead Moose
Part 1: The Phone Call
It was a day much like today, six or seven years ago. It was mud season, after what had been a long and snowy winter; the deep snow was finally starting to melt.
I was driving to pick my kids up at school when I got a phone call. It was my neighbor, Tim. Tim and his family are, as my kids point out, really our only neighbors, and even they are 3/4 of a mile down our dead-end dirt road.( In mud season, which is when this story happened, it is a death-defying quagmire.) Tim, who is not easily rattled, sounded upset. He said his son Daniel, who 14 or 15 at the time and on the ConVal track team, had taken a run on the slowly defrosting trail and come across a dead baby moose emerging from the snow.
“Daniel is super freaked out,” Tim said grimly. “He says the moose didn’t have a head. And it’s just a baby one.”
He let his words sink in. This could mean only one thing—a poacher.
Although we had been spending summers in Greenfield since 1995, we had been living full time in NH for only a few years. The possibility that someone had illegally killed what I considered my moose was completely horrifying (now, it would really be just another Tuesday!) Tim said he would go try to find the moose and check it out, and got off the phone. I then called my other neighbor, Sheldon Pennoyer, who is the go-to guy for the entire neighborhood on anything to do with the woods.
“Sheldon,“ I said, my heart racing, “Daniel found a dead baby moose in the woods and he says it doesn’t have a head! Could it have been a poacher?” I described the location, which was right across a popular mountain biking trail just off my driveway.
Sheldon heard the panic in my voice and, as he has on many occasions, calmed me down.
“It most likely died of natural causes, and someone took the head,” he said. “It’s very unlikely anyone around here would kill a baby moose or leave it right on the trail.” Sheldon said he would put the word out to the Greenfield trails club—a diehard group of cyclists who were out in the trails any weather, day and night, 12 months a year—to see if anybody knew anything
Then he added:
“But if we do find out that moose was killed illegally, I have a feeling who it could have been. We’ve had some problems with Joe Smith who lives back behind us on the swamp, hunting illegally before. If that moose was shot, leave him to me.”
I thought to myself, I would not want to be Joe Smith if we find a bullet near that moose!
I got off the phone with Sheldon and picked up my boys at their schools. I didn’t want to tell them anything yet. When we turned back into our driveway, I saw Tim, hiking back through the mud and melting snow—now it was sleeting and the wind was blowing hard. I stopped and put down the window.
“It has a head,” Tim said irately, wiping sweat and mud off his face—the moose was halfway up a steep hillside. “It was just buried in the snow. Daniel was just so freaked out he didn’t see it.”
“Phew,” I said, and waved to Tim as he slogged back to his house.
The back seat had grown very quiet. I turned around and saw two little faces staring at me with their jaws hanging open.
“MOM,” they said, “WHAT DID YOU THINK DIDN’T HAVE A HEAD?”
The first lesson from this moose was a reminder of how much I love my neighbors.
Part 2: Stand By Me
Right after that, we got another six inches of snow, and the moose was covered up again. While I was out of town for a few days, my husband ( who is a doctor and served in Iraq doing combat triage; nothing bothers him) set out to find it. This is what he saw (Warning! slide!!) By this time the coyotes had found it and started tearing it apart. My husband sent me this picture and warned it I might not want to come see it, I am famously squeamish. Our boys, on the other hand, could not wait to see it. Abe took them to see it and they were enthralled by the gore.
Mac, our younger son, then asked if he could bring his friends over to see it. Now again, I was pretty new to New Hampshire. Until my boys were 9 and 11, we always lived in the suburbs in several places around the country. Things in New Hampshire were really different from the suburbs. In our last town, the elementary school, and I am not kidding, had to have a two hour parents meeting to address concerns about the second grade talking a nature walk in the state forest in the same town. Parents raised their hands freaking out about everything from fisher cat attacks to poison ivy to Lyme disease. Theere was actually a policy in place that kids were not allowed to retrieve soccer balls from the woods. They would stand there staring at them on the other side of the fence.
So anyway, i was a little nervous about exposing other people’s fourth graders to the moose, which was, by this point, really gross. I approached one mom nervously,
“Raisa. I have to ask you something and I’m not sure what you’ll say.”
“Yes?”
“Would it be ok if August came over and looked at our dead moose?”
Raisa fell down laughing, as did Amy, the parent of the other child I asked. They both said, Oh my God, yes. And I was reminded, this is why we moved here.
A few days later, Mac, August and Emmett went hiking down the driveway to find the dead moose—just like, several parents remarked, the four boys in Stand By Me, one of my all-time favorite moves. It was now pretty warm out, and the moose had been decomposing for maybe a month. A hour or so later, they came back.
“What did you think?” I asked. The three boys looked at one another and shook their heads.
“That was really gross,” said August. Mac and Emmet concurred.
“We couldn’t even get that close to it,” said Emmett. “Because of the smell.”
“And the flies,” said Mac.
“And the maggots,” said August.
So the second gift from this moose was what the boys learned that day, which maybe a lot of kids in the world aren’t learning anymore: nature is beautiful, and harsh, and gross, and completely efficient.
Part 3: The Proposition
Just before Daniel spotted the moose, I had been taking a winter tracking class at the Harris Center, and at this class I met this really cool woman. Coincidentally, the same day the class started, this woman and I realized we are also on the same email list for the fourth grade boys lacrosse team. At the first game, I saw this woman sitting on a blanket with a baby who was about eighteen months old. This woman was so cool, and I just thought, I would really love to be friends with her. So I sidled up and asked her:
“Hey, want to come over and see my dead moose?”
To which she said, “Yes, I do!”
This woman possibly the best person in the Monadmock Region to solve the mystery of the our dead moose: it was Susie Spikol of the Harris Center. A few days later, Susie came over with her baby, David, on her back, and hiked up to find the dead moose. When we found it, it still has most of its fur, with its organs torn out.
Little David, in the backpack, looked down at the moose and said,
“Dat moose is dead,” with seemingly no alarm. Obviously this child is a New Hampshire native!!
Susie did immediately solve the mystery, which would not be a mystery to anyone who knew anything about what is going in with moose in New Hampshire these days. She said the young moose had probably died from dehydration from ticks. Covered with thousands of these blood sucking parasites, the poor little moose had collapsed, by strange luck, right on our mountain bike trail. Ten feet in either direction and no one would have ever known.
Susie said in all her years being a naturalist in New Hampshire, she had never before come across a decomposing moose. She said the moose population has been decimated by ticks in recent years, and which, as we all know, is affected by global warming.
When I told Susie about this essay, she told me David still brings up the moose to this day.
The third gift from the moose was my new friend.
Part 4: The Head
All that spring, we kept checking on the moose. What was fascinating was to see how quickly nature disposed of it, but also, how long some traces of it stuck around. A thick mat of moose hair stayed on the trail for at least four years, and I would find clumps of it all around that area long after the mat was gone. Every week when we checked on the moose, more of it had disappeared. A few weeks after Susie, David and I saw the moose, my husband and I returned to find virtually no soft tissue left on the skeleton, except the intestines, which were what I will call….an advanced state of decay.
Sometime after that, even the intestines were gone. Coyotes had torn away the skin, muscle and organs, and the bones were spread all over the area. There were signs of the gnawing on the bones—a feast for the countless rodents waking up from hibernation—as well as the trails of insects. At one point I found one of the hoofs and brought it home for the dog, but the dog had no interest in it.
The one thing we never found, however, was the head. After Tim had located it under the snow, it was covered up again, but then we never saw it again. My husband and I scoured the whole area and were amazed by how far away we found other bones—ribs, leg bones, even the pelvis—but no skull.
This got me thinking. While I am close to many of my neighbors, there are far more that I don’t know. In fact, there are probably a lot more people out there in the woods than we realize. Just today, I found a deer stand I didn’t know was there! I’ve had more than one person tell me that their grandfather brought them hunting on Woodland Hill or Blanchard Hill, and now they’re bringing their son or daughter. We’ve had a few issues with ATV’s. One time we found a caravan of Jeeps stuck on our Class 6 roads. I had someone who wanted to bait bears with organic apples. Even so, I have rarely ever found so much as a beer can in the woods. Someone out there, not one of my friends or neighbors, or at least they are not admitting it, found and took the moose skullI. We have no idea who. If Joe Smith has the moose skull, he probably took it for the same reason I wanted it: it’s cool. Most of us who live here also love that we live side by side with these beautiful wild animals. We may not always agree on how to use the land, we all love the woods.
I wrote this essay years ago, not knowing I would read it as part of event for the Monadnock Conservancy. But the final lesson I learned from the moose is very simple: the woods belong to all of us. They bring us together. We share them in ways we may not even realize. Preserving our rural landscapes and keeping at least part of the woods wild is something that benefits us all.
It was a day much like today, six or seven years ago. It was mud season, after what had been a long and snowy winter; the deep snow was finally starting to melt.
I was driving to pick my kids up at school when I got a phone call. It was my neighbor, Tim. Tim and his family are, as my kids point out, really our only neighbors, and even they are 3/4 of a mile down our dead-end dirt road.( In mud season, which is when this story happened, it is a death-defying quagmire.) Tim, who is not easily rattled, sounded upset. He said his son Daniel, who 14 or 15 at the time and on the ConVal track team, had taken a run on the slowly defrosting trail and come across a dead baby moose emerging from the snow.
“Daniel is super freaked out,” Tim said grimly. “He says the moose didn’t have a head. And it’s just a baby one.”
He let his words sink in. This could mean only one thing—a poacher.
Although we had been spending summers in Greenfield since 1995, we had been living full time in NH for only a few years. The possibility that someone had illegally killed what I considered my moose was completely horrifying (now, it would really be just another Tuesday!) Tim said he would go try to find the moose and check it out, and got off the phone. I then called my other neighbor, Sheldon Pennoyer, who is the go-to guy for the entire neighborhood on anything to do with the woods.
“Sheldon,“ I said, my heart racing, “Daniel found a dead baby moose in the woods and he says it doesn’t have a head! Could it have been a poacher?” I described the location, which was right across a popular mountain biking trail just off my driveway.
Sheldon heard the panic in my voice and, as he has on many occasions, calmed me down.
“It most likely died of natural causes, and someone took the head,” he said. “It’s very unlikely anyone around here would kill a baby moose or leave it right on the trail.” Sheldon said he would put the word out to the Greenfield trails club—a diehard group of cyclists who were out in the trails any weather, day and night, 12 months a year—to see if anybody knew anything
Then he added:
“But if we do find out that moose was killed illegally, I have a feeling who it could have been. We’ve had some problems with Joe Smith who lives back behind us on the swamp, hunting illegally before. If that moose was shot, leave him to me.”
I thought to myself, I would not want to be Joe Smith if we find a bullet near that moose!
I got off the phone with Sheldon and picked up my boys at their schools. I didn’t want to tell them anything yet. When we turned back into our driveway, I saw Tim, hiking back through the mud and melting snow—now it was sleeting and the wind was blowing hard. I stopped and put down the window.
“It has a head,” Tim said irately, wiping sweat and mud off his face—the moose was halfway up a steep hillside. “It was just buried in the snow. Daniel was just so freaked out he didn’t see it.”
“Phew,” I said, and waved to Tim as he slogged back to his house.
The back seat had grown very quiet. I turned around and saw two little faces staring at me with their jaws hanging open.
“MOM,” they said, “WHAT DID YOU THINK DIDN’T HAVE A HEAD?”
The first lesson from this moose was a reminder of how much I love my neighbors.
Part 2: Stand By Me
Right after that, we got another six inches of snow, and the moose was covered up again. While I was out of town for a few days, my husband ( who is a doctor and served in Iraq doing combat triage; nothing bothers him) set out to find it. This is what he saw (Warning! slide!!) By this time the coyotes had found it and started tearing it apart. My husband sent me this picture and warned it I might not want to come see it, I am famously squeamish. Our boys, on the other hand, could not wait to see it. Abe took them to see it and they were enthralled by the gore.
Mac, our younger son, then asked if he could bring his friends over to see it. Now again, I was pretty new to New Hampshire. Until my boys were 9 and 11, we always lived in the suburbs in several places around the country. Things in New Hampshire were really different from the suburbs. In our last town, the elementary school, and I am not kidding, had to have a two hour parents meeting to address concerns about the second grade talking a nature walk in the state forest in the same town. Parents raised their hands freaking out about everything from fisher cat attacks to poison ivy to Lyme disease. Theere was actually a policy in place that kids were not allowed to retrieve soccer balls from the woods. They would stand there staring at them on the other side of the fence.
So anyway, i was a little nervous about exposing other people’s fourth graders to the moose, which was, by this point, really gross. I approached one mom nervously,
“Raisa. I have to ask you something and I’m not sure what you’ll say.”
“Yes?”
“Would it be ok if August came over and looked at our dead moose?”
Raisa fell down laughing, as did Amy, the parent of the other child I asked. They both said, Oh my God, yes. And I was reminded, this is why we moved here.
A few days later, Mac, August and Emmett went hiking down the driveway to find the dead moose—just like, several parents remarked, the four boys in Stand By Me, one of my all-time favorite moves. It was now pretty warm out, and the moose had been decomposing for maybe a month. A hour or so later, they came back.
“What did you think?” I asked. The three boys looked at one another and shook their heads.
“That was really gross,” said August. Mac and Emmet concurred.
“We couldn’t even get that close to it,” said Emmett. “Because of the smell.”
“And the flies,” said Mac.
“And the maggots,” said August.
So the second gift from this moose was what the boys learned that day, which maybe a lot of kids in the world aren’t learning anymore: nature is beautiful, and harsh, and gross, and completely efficient.
Part 3: The Proposition
Just before Daniel spotted the moose, I had been taking a winter tracking class at the Harris Center, and at this class I met this really cool woman. Coincidentally, the same day the class started, this woman and I realized we are also on the same email list for the fourth grade boys lacrosse team. At the first game, I saw this woman sitting on a blanket with a baby who was about eighteen months old. This woman was so cool, and I just thought, I would really love to be friends with her. So I sidled up and asked her:
“Hey, want to come over and see my dead moose?”
To which she said, “Yes, I do!”
This woman possibly the best person in the Monadmock Region to solve the mystery of the our dead moose: it was Susie Spikol of the Harris Center. A few days later, Susie came over with her baby, David, on her back, and hiked up to find the dead moose. When we found it, it still has most of its fur, with its organs torn out.
Little David, in the backpack, looked down at the moose and said,
“Dat moose is dead,” with seemingly no alarm. Obviously this child is a New Hampshire native!!
Susie did immediately solve the mystery, which would not be a mystery to anyone who knew anything about what is going in with moose in New Hampshire these days. She said the young moose had probably died from dehydration from ticks. Covered with thousands of these blood sucking parasites, the poor little moose had collapsed, by strange luck, right on our mountain bike trail. Ten feet in either direction and no one would have ever known.
Susie said in all her years being a naturalist in New Hampshire, she had never before come across a decomposing moose. She said the moose population has been decimated by ticks in recent years, and which, as we all know, is affected by global warming.
When I told Susie about this essay, she told me David still brings up the moose to this day.
The third gift from the moose was my new friend.
Part 4: The Head
All that spring, we kept checking on the moose. What was fascinating was to see how quickly nature disposed of it, but also, how long some traces of it stuck around. A thick mat of moose hair stayed on the trail for at least four years, and I would find clumps of it all around that area long after the mat was gone. Every week when we checked on the moose, more of it had disappeared. A few weeks after Susie, David and I saw the moose, my husband and I returned to find virtually no soft tissue left on the skeleton, except the intestines, which were what I will call….an advanced state of decay.
Sometime after that, even the intestines were gone. Coyotes had torn away the skin, muscle and organs, and the bones were spread all over the area. There were signs of the gnawing on the bones—a feast for the countless rodents waking up from hibernation—as well as the trails of insects. At one point I found one of the hoofs and brought it home for the dog, but the dog had no interest in it.
The one thing we never found, however, was the head. After Tim had located it under the snow, it was covered up again, but then we never saw it again. My husband and I scoured the whole area and were amazed by how far away we found other bones—ribs, leg bones, even the pelvis—but no skull.
This got me thinking. While I am close to many of my neighbors, there are far more that I don’t know. In fact, there are probably a lot more people out there in the woods than we realize. Just today, I found a deer stand I didn’t know was there! I’ve had more than one person tell me that their grandfather brought them hunting on Woodland Hill or Blanchard Hill, and now they’re bringing their son or daughter. We’ve had a few issues with ATV’s. One time we found a caravan of Jeeps stuck on our Class 6 roads. I had someone who wanted to bait bears with organic apples. Even so, I have rarely ever found so much as a beer can in the woods. Someone out there, not one of my friends or neighbors, or at least they are not admitting it, found and took the moose skullI. We have no idea who. If Joe Smith has the moose skull, he probably took it for the same reason I wanted it: it’s cool. Most of us who live here also love that we live side by side with these beautiful wild animals. We may not always agree on how to use the land, we all love the woods.
I wrote this essay years ago, not knowing I would read it as part of event for the Monadnock Conservancy. But the final lesson I learned from the moose is very simple: the woods belong to all of us. They bring us together. We share them in ways we may not even realize. Preserving our rural landscapes and keeping at least part of the woods wild is something that benefits us all.
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