Striped Skunk, from *All Creation Waits* (Gayle Boss)

Dec 14

Dec 14 Striped Skunk, from All Creation Waits (Gayle Boss)

Editor’s note: AllCreation.org is thrilled to reprint, with permission from the author and Paraclete Press, the full text of the All Creation Waits devotional reading for Advent 17, which this year falls on December 15, 2020. - Carmen Retzlaff

ADVENT 17

Striped Skunk

Because her eyesight is poor, and because I was downwind and standing as still as I could bear in the mosquito-thick morning at the edge of the woods, I was insubstantial as a spirit to her. What was substantial—and consequential—was the quick cricket in the leafmeal. She thrust her pink-tipped nose into the leaf litter, tossed it aside, and pounced.

The sun was already up that late October morning and she hadn’t retreated to a hollow log or stump to sleep away the day. She knows, I thought, she knows the snow and cold are coming. She’s hunting overtime, urgent to get fat.

Or maybe she was out late that morning because she’d ceded some of her night feeding time to the other urgency of October: nest readying. All the rest of the year she beds in the hubbub above ground, but in the cold, spare season her survival sense forces her to go deeper. During that autumn night she might have been scraping together leaves and grass, pushing them ahead of her down a woodchuck hole, then deftly making her bed. No matter if the chuck was there. Gentle as she is, she happily shares the den with him; and anyway, awake or asleep, he stays in his chamber at the den’s far end, leaving the rest to her. And her sisters.

A quiet soul, she prefers to make her way through the world alone, or with her kits. But when winter begins nipping at her shoulder, she compromises. She may have scraped, pushed, and shaped a full bushel of leaves and grass into a nest precisely to her liking. But come late November she might leave that perfect bed empty and join three or five or nine other females in the nest one of them has made. What matters is not whose nest, but togetherness.

By now, Advent’s center, the skunks that find themselves denned together are curled into a single ball of black fur, white stripes undulating through it. Most nights they rouse for a few minutes. A couple may go to the entrance hole and, if it’s not sealed up with snow, poke pink noses out into the sharp air. But soon they’re all re-balled, drifting up and down the ladder of sleep.

Fat skunks can stay on the upper rungs of that ladder. Thinner sisters must slide deeper down the ladder and stay there asleep longer, burning less fat, but stressing their systems. Thicker or thinner, each shares her heat with the others, so all in the ball save fat they would have had to burn if alone. Fat is the only food each one has underground; tucked into the huddle, what she has goes further. And not only to sustain her single life. The several new lives she wants to make when winter ends can only take hold and grow in her if she has enough of herself left.

So, solitary the rest of the year, here she folds herself into others. Ninety days, a hundred—winter howls on. As the body of each one shrinks, they wrap the ball of their slighter selves tighter and lean into the warmth that, together, they are.

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