FOR SALE:
“Pas de Deux”
Pencils, watercolor. 2026. ($200. If interested in purchase, please email dterrydraw@aol.com or pm on Facebook).
I happily finished this yesterday, having spent more time in stopping every two minutes to sharpen white pencils (a tedious process) than I did in actually drawing the thing.
And, yes……having spent my entire life more or less around them, I am stuffed to the gills with possum-facts. They CAN’T, in fact, harbor the rabies virus, they will (if left to their own devices) sup on upwards of 39,000 ticks per day in your yard (an inflated claim, I suspect, but who am I to argue?), and are (along with thoroughbred horses) relentlessly suicidal. Trust me on this last fact.
Another interesting possum-fact: my terriers were terrified of them….even the babies (which seem to launch themselves out of their nests at every opportunity, without ever breaking their necks after falling twenty and more feet to the ground).
At least once per week, one of the terriers would come barrelling into the house, whining for me to go outside. Eventually, I would follow him/her, to find the entire pack in a circle, barking furiously as they circled around a possum. If the possum moved, they would scatter backwards, before re-gathering to repeat the entire inane procedure. This could go on for hours.
The possum would, of course, just sit in the middle…hunkered low to the ground, with its mouth gaping widely as it hissed at nothing in particular. Possums are not bright. This is an understatement.
I’m pretty sure that the dogs didn’t know WHAT a possum was. I don’t imagine that their Scottish ancestry left them genetically prepared for possum encounters. Of course, possums don’t look like anything else, and I imagine (never having investigated the matter) that they don’t smell like anything else, either. In any case, the dogs’ nerves were always shot after a possum encounter. So were the possum’s. I always ended these noisy hullabaloos by simply dropping a blanket over mister possum, using it to haul him back to the woods beyond the yard/garden….and off he would go, in a slow scuttle. They’re not very fast or graceful.
And despite having been born & raised in rural East Tennessee, I have never eaten a possum and am not likely to do so anytime soon. The Beverly Hillbillies and Tennessee Ernie Ford are, I gather, responsible for that dietary myth.