Read Online Driving Minnie's Piano by Lesley Choyce - Free Book Online

a
pair of other middle-aged surfers who join me to regain their
sanity the same way I do. By the time I come ashore, there are
great icicles of salt water hanging from my shaggy hair that
protrudes from my wetsuit hood. My lips are bluish and my fingers
are nearly too numb to work the key into the
ignition.
    But the clouds are gone, the
sun has reappeared, the world is a glistening white. I'll return to
my office, plug myself back into the so-called real world. I'll
hammer out a few problems, wrestle some numbers to the ground,
maybe even write a few paragraphs.
    And then, by late afternoon,
having done six hours of work in three, I'll put on my drysuit
again. The wind will have died down. The sun will be sinking in the
west, setting the water on fire. I'll be back in the winter sea
dropping down the face of a smooth, elegant wave, the one that has
been destined and waiting for me to arrive. I will go left again
and discover I am tucked into a hollow green room of water
advancing towards its own destruction on the shallow rocky shores.
The setting sun will be in the open doorway at the end of this
graceful tunnel as I close my eyes briefly, then open them again
and slide back out into the world of oxygen and frozen
dreams.

    The Year of the Skunk

    My two-hundred-year-old
farmhouse was built with the wood of barns torn down and of timber
scavenged from the beached remains of ships that wrecked in
terrible storms off the coast. In the winter, otters slip and slide
over the wind-whipped dunes of snow on the frozen marsh, seals come
ashore and sometimes sprawl on the gravel road until I chase them
back towards the sea for their own safety. In summer, great blue
herons stand on one leg in the shallow pools in front of my home
and deer invade my garden to savour my peas and Swiss chard until I
erect scarecrows from old orange shirts and red
pants.
    My house sits on a loose stone
foundation with a damp basement dug by hand by men who wrestled
away rocks the size of basketballs. Beneath the living room, there
is bedrock that reaches down to the molten core of the earth. The
bedrock allows only for a crawl space, providing a warm, welcoming
shelter for creatures from the wilderness. And that's the beginning
of my story and the beginning of my problem.

    An old house with crawl
spaces, cracks in the floorboards and drafty slits in the walls is
a great invitation for creatures of the wild. Some years, mice
arrive by the dozens, invading the kitchen cabinets, consuming
cornflakes, candy bars, and raisins. Their pestering presence
pushes my family beyond reason. I catch the mice in small plastic
traps that do no harm. A smudge of peanut butter on a kind of
teeter-totter lures them inside and triggers a door to drop. I
drive them to the beach and set them free in the dunes, wishing
them well but requesting they not return to my
abode.
    Weasels appear once or twice a
year. My wife, Terry, found one - pure white in his winter garb -
lounging casually on our sofa one morning as if he belonged there.
He had stepped on the remote control that turned on the television.
It was as if he'd come inside to watch his favourite show. Terry
screamed and the weasel fled. Another arrived one spring day and
toured the house several times, until he returned to the kitchen.
Here, he danced around in the cabinet of dishes and bowls, making a
great fanfare about his presence, unconcerned with the leaping and
barking of my dog.
    On another occasion, a pure
white dove, sitting atop the smoking chimney with a wood stove
alight below, swooned from the intoxicating aroma of burning spruce
wood, fell down the chimney and was retrieved by my daughter,
Sunyata, from the sooty depths below. Half black, half white, the
dove survived and became a great friend of the family, a mystical
bird that would fly down from the trees and alight on your hand or
sit on your shoulder.
    Porcupines have often been a
problem. One lived in the crawl space under my house and came out
at