A friend of our is a licensed wildlife rehabilitator for raccoons. I don’t know if he’s still doing it, but at one time, he got all the baby orphan raccoons for a certain region. He came to our lake place for the weekend & had the cutest, tiniest baby raccoon in a small cat carrier. She had to be fed every couple of hours so we saw a lot of her - just adorable.
He named her Sally & she was probably his favorite rescue. Once the babies were big enough, he had a large outdoor pen at the edge of the woods where they would live. They all got rabies shots. When it was time to release, he would leave the pen door open. The raccoons would come & go, staying away longer & longer until they just didn’t come back.
A year or more, after Sally was released, he noticed activity at the raccoon pen (empty at the time) & went to check it out. There was an adult raccoon ... with a kit. The raccoon was very friendly, seemed familiar ... could it be? It was! Sally! After that visit, he never saw her again, but he said he felt like she came to show off her baby & let him know she was doing just fine ❤️
That story about Sally is so very sweet! 🥰
This latest round of juveniles that sneak up into our deck are probably great great grandchildren of the ones from 2019. Maybe even another generation removed.
We are still in the dreaming/designing phase of that meditation garden. It will probably be a year before we see things come to fruition. Too many other things need our attention.
Up next is the driveway repair. There is a company that will fill under our current concrete with something, I’m not sure what, but level it and fill in all the cracks. I worry that someone may accidentally stub their foot on one section in particular, and land hard. That happened to our next door neighbor a few years ago (on her own driveway). This is yet another project that we have put off for years, but it really needs to be done.
Today we spent hours outside moving things off of the driveway that were on the part they’ll need to repair, at the very edge. Also many plants have grown over onto the driveway. So it all had to be cleaned up. We got almost all of it finished, with the exception of one huge potted plant. That can wait to be moved until the day before they come. I think Wednesday but my brain is jello right now.
I think we are officially at the “money pit” stage of maintaining this house. If it’s not a project outside, there’s always more inside. Ahhh, the joys of home ownership!