Foxes and shooting stars

I have the best patio ever.

Sure, it's loaded with all sorts of grit, filth and crap, but it's classy crap, mind you. Bourgeois things like potting soil and empty flower troughs and plant experiments and liquor bottles and ashtrays and overflowing shopping bags full of patio garbage, plus three mismatched chairs and a rickety card table. Our apartment is on the ground floor, so the view from there is spectacular. For example, I can watch my neighbors' torsos as they cook--or erm, cut--or erm, do something in the kitchen, and I know when they go for a shower or a shit, and I know how long their children stay awake.

Since the arctic permafrost settled in some six months ago, I haven't been using the patio for anything much really, much less spying on my boring neighbors. It was too cold to smoke, too cold to sit, too cold to stand. The only thing it's been good for since October is keeping beverages cold (hence the liquor bottles). But in the last few days, the temperature has been so humane that we've been sitting out there of an evening and enjoying a non-alcoholic beverage or three.

Night before last, the 'Stoph and I were sitting out there, solving the problems of religion, politics, ethics and the world and gazing into the heavens when the longest, shiniest, sparkliest shooting star you've ever seen bisected the sky. It was so long that we had to actually move our necks as if we were watching a tennis ball being volleyed across a court. There was something magical about sharing that moment, since all the shooting stars I've ever seen have been too short for anyone else to have seen them, unless they'd been looking at the exact same place at the exact same time I was, which has never happened.

Of course, in reality, all we watched was a particularly large and stubborn space-turd entering the Earth's atmosphere at the wrong angle (idiot!) but it did seem to be special at the time.

Last night, I was out there with a book and a Club Maté and a cigarette when out of the corner of my eye I spotted something larger than a cat and smaller than a dog with a longish tail clumsily creeping around on the other side of the lawn. After having seen several of them and even gotten close enough to touch one, I'm not sure why I'm always so surprised to see foxes in our courtyard, but it never fails to catch me off-guard. A mix of fascination and fear compels me to first whistle and click at the fox, then prepare myself for flight in case he decides to charge. Naturally, this has never been the case, as, for whatever reason, foxes do not seem to be aggressive toward humans, at least not in the city.

So the fox and I had a pleasant little stare-down, me clicking and whistling, and he pausing every few seconds to see who the hell was making stupid noises in his courtyard, and me wondering how high he could jump (some of them can even jump over the moon) and whether or not I could slip indoors before he came to chew my scalp off. Then he got down on his belly, out of the floodlight that illuminates the pedestrian path, and slunk off into the moonlit night.

I should really savor and appreciate these sightings while they last, as, in a few months, the most interesting things I'll be seeing in the courtyard are drunkards pissing on our bushes and teenagers fucking, without condoms, in the trees.