I saw a fox out the bathroom window early on a cool, spring morning. It was trotting across the backyard, then cut through the path by the marriage tree before picking up pace in the thick. I caught glimpses of the copper coat as it raced through the early green, heading who knows where. It was a beautiful, sleek, healthy fox.
This felt important, symbolic somehow, even though I know it’s not. It was just me needing to pee at the moment the fox cut through the yard. Fox sightings are fairly rare here, and this one seems a meaningful bookend to the devil dog I encountered a few years ago. A hopeful sign at what is hopefully the back end of my long dark night. This reading is built by my brain, but isn’t everything? Aren’t we desperately seeking meaning, always? My symbolic fox may be your symbolic smoke ring, your tea leaves — found in the universal, meaning is personal.
It was spring, too, years ago when I saw the devil dog. Steven was half a country away in Texas managing the affairs of his dying mother. I was here, home in New York, with kids and animals in various states of disarray. Some of us were breaking down, some near an end. I was here with me, the rattled and unraveling middle version of me. My euphemistic ‘change’ was a years-long house of horrors, one that I still seek words for.
I left the house on a chilly morning to walk the dog and, as I approached the barn by the driveway, there it was. A canine vision of hell, just feet away and looking right at me. It was almost dreamlike, and I accepted this ominous waking dream with the resignation of the afflicted. All manner of unwelcome, unfamiliar things had presented themselves to me in my dark chapter — why not a demon canine on a spring morning? We stood and stared, slack and outside time, until Evie pulled on the leash. The creature crept away into the yard, looking back at me with wild, haunted eyes.
The animal was a disheveled mess, a hunched and matted thing that initially defied classification, and my brain whispered devil dog. But as it made its slow, clearly pained way off into the woods, I recognized the fox. It was unwell and possibly injured, and had been hiding in the barn. The further it got from me, the more my initial fear melted away and reorganized into pity. I stood in the driveway and wept. This fox was the most pathetic, heartbreaking creature I’d ever seen up close and it lived in my imagination for a long time. It became a sad and shattering twin to my difficult midlife journey, rising up in the night, in dreams, snatching my breath at the most mundane, domestic moments.
The wretched fox ghost haunted me for days, as I walked dogs, washed dishes, made dinner, and gathered my unraveling in the wee hours.
The fox broke me, made me more deeply sad than anything else — which is saying something, given my personal torment and the raging news. But, along with a tumbling despair, it also gave me some psychic company in the worst lonely times. Nothing felt right in the world, outside or in, but the withered fox was perspective. It seemed part of me, somehow. The fox was just foxing, even with the worst hand, and though it broke me, it broke me new. It pointed me in the direction of carrying on.
What else is there to do, after all, but carry on?
The second fox — so bright and strong in the early sun, streaking across my yard with an agenda and no care for me, no need for my barn — was different. Strong, busy, confident; is this fox part of me, too? Please can it be, just a little? Months have passed, years. People and pets have passed, risen and fallen. I am still here, and somehow stronger. There is light in my darkness now, the unraveling is somewhat mended. And one more fox has shown herself to remind me of the way forward.
🦊
Lisa
So beautiful. What powerful symbols those foxes are.
This is beautiful Lisa. For a time in my youth my nickname was 'Vixen' (Vicki shortened to Vix and then morphed into Vixen) so I always felt a little affinity with foxes. We don't have any here in New Zealand, but I miss them, they have also come to symbolise my British home and roots 🦊