I’ve become a bit of a groundhog lately.
I’d call it becoming a rabbit, for its quality of “going down the rabbit-hole”—that ever-tunneling capacity my brain excels at, for better and worse—except one time our groundhog, who has made lace out of the bedrock under the garden shed, bogarted my favorite chartreuse cardigan off the laundry line and stuffed it halfway down his hole for most of a winter before I found it, and I really, really admire that.
This tendency to tunnel, to go subterranean, is truly excellent if you wish to know more about what is underneath you. It’s necessary for a writer, a poet, a person who wishes to know the internality of things.
It is a slightly less excellent quality when you find yourself forgetting what sunlight looks like.
This natural tendency to Groundhog has conspired with Events (including but not limited to Unfortunate Pharmaceutical Experiences, Raising Twins, No More Actual Light in the Sky Until April, and Not Having Left Town for Four Years) to become a Real Nuisance and Hindrance to Realistic Perceptions.
Let me explain.