Where the Wild Things Are

A friend once told me her mother keeps a baseball bat by the entrance of their house because she once opened the door to find an aggressive and self-assured flasher.

Random things can happen any time we open literal or figurative doors to the world and because of recent incidents, I believe it’s time to explore the various species that have appeared on my doorstep in the past few months.

Each time I open my door lately there seems to be an evolution of the kind of surprise waiting on the other side. That is to say, each subsequent instance, the item found on the doorstep is odder or more mysterious than the one before.

It began simply enough, as one evening my housemates and I noticed there were ducks on our front lawn. There is nothing particularly disturbing or interesting about ducks, and suffice it to say that we fed them in hopes of keeping them as endearing pets of the outdoor sort.

From that moment on, it was as though those ducks told all the other creatures of the city that our doorstep was awesome and we distributed the best bread around.

For instance, one night, when putting the garbage out by the curb, I walked two steps outside the front door and found myself frozen in fear as a skunk, barely visible in the dark, stared up at me as if to say, “go for it, make my day”.

Shaking and wide-eyed, I placed the garbage down slowly while talking to the skunk the way hostages speak to knife-wielding criminals; struggling to keep my voice as calm as possible.

“You don’t want to do this...I’m going to slowly back away from you...I’m going to ask that you stop twitching like that.”

It took a good twenty minutes of staring out from the front window, garbage in hand, and popping my head out the door while making, what I assumed to be, terrifying hissing noises to bore the skunk to the point where he figured he’d go annoy another crazy person instead.

In the pattern of the creatures at my front door becoming increasingly strange, my second encounter with our ducks occurred a few weeks after the skunk. This time I opened the door to find them waddling around in the grass looking up expectantly. As I locked the door behind me, a deep voice came out of nowhere:

“Don’t scare the ducks!”

“Bah! Holy shh- I’m the one being scared! Didn’t see you there.”

Our next-door neighbour, a lone 50 year old with whom we share a small front porch, was standing there staring at the ducks. I had started on my way to class when he stood in front of the steps and began with his philosophy on ducks.

“They mate for life you know, ducks.”

“wow, fascinating.”

“yes, there are always two, see.”

“yep, that’s nice.”

“They fall in love like humans. You’ll often find at the side of the road one duck will be pecking at the carcass of another duck. They don’t understand death, you see. They just wonder where their love has gone off to.”

While this may have been charming sentiment from any other elderly man, I was late
for class and, quite frankly, our neighbour is one of the species we are never thrilled to find at our doorstep.

Though he has an exceptional ability to yap away about ducks, our previous encounter with him was when he had come over to apologize.

There was a loud tap at the door and when I had answered he put on what he imagined was a pleasing nasal tone and said with the enthusiasm of a cheerleader, “Oh heyyyy girrrlllll!”

For the record, I nearly lost it right at that moment.

He proceeded to apologize profusely (without ever mentioning why) while flapping an envelope around. Turns out he had “accidentally” read our handwritten, personalized mail.

According to Snoopy, he got three quarters of the way through the mail addressed to a girl before realizing it wasn’t for him.

From ducks to more dangerous critters (skunks), to the downright strange (old dude), there have been many mysterious things outside our door, but none more mysterious than what we have deemed “the orphan”.

About two weeks ago my housemates woke to find a large potted plant placed strategically in front of our door. In a Herculean state, this indoor plant was orphaned and so we took it in as one of our own. We named him Oliver, Ollie for short, and now he graces the patio out back.

I like to think the gods have sent us the mystery plant. That, or the secret service has planted a nanny cam and we are now in an awkward situation.

While the items that appear on our doorstep are certainly strange and often begin uncomfortable interactions -- I’m not necessarily proud of speaking to that skunk -- at least there hasn’t been any reason to start keeping a blunt object by the door. Yet.