The story of the possum graveyard

When life goes off the rails, I become unhinged, and it stinks.

Dear readers and friends,

As some of you know, my life has gone a little bit off the rails in the last few weeks. I have my grandmother’s good sense to remember that there are those who are suffering much worse fates than mine and, frankly, I don’t want to come off as whiney but … April has been a shit sandwich.

Last week, stuck in isolation with Covid and a UTI in the midst of all the other shit swirling, I sent a co-worker the photo above. She replied, I can’t wait to read about that on your Substack. She happens to be

Jen Rubin

, an award-winning storyteller with a fantastic sense of humor and a talent for making a mess, like a collection of bones, into dinner-table entertainment. Me, not so much.

Honestly, it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would want to read about one more in a long list of difficult situations my family has been facing since the beginning of April, when the nonprofit where I work as communications director got the strange and sneaky news, delivered in the middle of night from an unknown source, that our federal funding had been revoked, effectively immediately. That was on April 2nd. This was an illegal reversal of Congressional funding, signed into the budget by the President on March 15th, that sent my professional world spinning top speed into a state of emergency. I shared my own version of how the loss of federal funds will impact our state and county, including forcing the layoff of all eight staff, in our city’s newspaper, linked here. The story continues to unfold and I’m including the latest updates at the end of this letter. Thanks for sticking with me.

But on the homefront, the news has also been sorta shitty. Specifically, I fell down the stairs and hurt my shoulder. My immediate family recovered from Strep throat just as other family members and friends went into acute health crisis. And then there was a horrific smell coming from our two-car garage. The smell was so bad, we stayed clear for a couple days, leaving the doors open to air out. The smell just wafted up the yard toward the house.

Seriously, my only reference for this terrible, huge, powerful smell was in the tanneries of Morocco. Both that smell then and this smell coming from my garage were trauma-inducing, unforgettable, potent and tangible things.

I shared the story of the stench of the Moroccan tanneries here.

We don’t keep our car in the garage, but we do have a lot of stuff … bikes, a ping-pong table, a tread-mill, shelves piled high with stuff for bikes, lots of folding chairs and folding tables and lawn games shoved this way and that. It’s an organized mess.

We started pulling everything out onto the lawn. Two days in a row, my husband and I tried our best to figure out what was going on. Really, he is the hero who put on a ventilator mask and did most of the work in this story, but I was supportive. With a flashlight and a considerable amount of stubborn determination, he searched. When his power of smell had gone numb, he would call me to assist, asking me to use my own nose to divine where the source could be hiding. It was a mystery. But by the end of the second search mission, I think he realized what had to be done.

About seven years ago, according to his memory, there was a possum in our backyard in the late afternoon. The big, ugly, nocturnal creature was dragging himself down the driveway very slowly. His back legs were injured. Maybe he’d been hit by a car?

My husband got a heavy metal garden shovel from the garage and walked toward the big grey animal, prepared physically if not psychologically to whack the possum over the head. But he never got the chance. All of a sudden, that poor injured beast turned on a secret super-speed and zoomed through the yard, around the side of the garage, and into a hole! That’s how we discovered there was a hole in the rotting tree stump behind our garage.

The man from Animal Control showed up then, with a little pistol in his belt, and suggested putting lye down the hole. That would have been a good idea, we think now, but we didn’t have any lye. So my husband packed the hole full of dirt, tamped it shut, and monitored it. He tells me he checked it regularly over the years, which I find impressive and responsible of him. I pretty much forgot about it. I mean, I never forgot the look of that possum with the beady red eyes dragging himself down my driveway mid-afternoon, but I guess I just moved on.

Then last weekend, after days of searching and not find the source of the smell, my hero husband tore open the back wall of the garage. He pulled apart wooden boards to reveal the stinking, rotting corpse of what he believes is the seven-year-old possum.

He says he recognized the animal.

But he didn’t just find the long-lost injured possum, he discovered a graveyard.

Alongside the pile of decay and maggots were a lot of old bones. Bones apparently from years or decades past, when other animals crawled in this particular hole to die. I don’t know when the garage was built, or how ‘our’ possum heard about the graveyard, or why it took seven years to stink, but I do know that this April is just stinky shit sandwich.

A couple of days after we found the possum graveyard, the person we hired many months ago to retile our bathroom floor — because the subfloor beneath the toilet was clearly rotting, and because at that time I had a job and a salary — showed up to get started. He quickly pulled up the old tile. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was evidence of mold. Naturally, he suggested that the bathtub might be about to fall through the floor into the basement of our more than 100-year-old house. Of course it could be that bad.

I was upstairs working in my home office when my husband went next door to borrow a sledgehammer from the neighbor. It was surprising to me how quickly that tub was demolished.

So, now we have been living without a downstairs toilet for over a week (ok, we do still have one upstairs) while I tried my best to keep my Covid to myself. And we have a big project on our hands.

The latest

On April 29th, the Mellon Foundation announced a large gift meant as a lifeline to save state humanities councils left to die after the sudden, illegal cuts made by DOGE and the Administration on April 2nd.

For Wisconsin Humanities, where I work, this means we have a matching gift of $50,000 to create a raft that might rescue the organization from the brink. Organizational survival is crucial because it is the only chance to bring federal support for the humanities back to Wisconsin –support that is still mandated by federal law and only available to Wisconsinites through Wisconsin Humanities.

If you are wondering what ‘the humanities’ are, I’ll suggest the word probably encompasses what you care most deeply about — your history, your culture, your beliefs and values, your ideas about the world and the stories you tell about your place in it. The humanities is a shorthand way to reference the ways humans explore the past, the present, and the future.

Wisconsin Humanities programs and grants to communities represent a very real and important investment in a state that ranks at the very bottom for per capita spending on arts and humanities. So, yeah, if you live in Wisconsin, consider making a donation please. Your gift will be matched 1:1. And if you live anywhere in the United States, your state’s humanities council is also asking for your help right now.

Thanks for reading, sharing, and telling me what you are thinking! I know this got long, but if you are interested in food, history, and how people carry their cultural heritage through stories, check out Jen Rubin’s new Substack, “The Great Midwest Bagel Quest.”

Sincerely,