Yes, that’s exactly right: a groundhog made short work of the delicate buffet that was our garden. At another moment, this discovery would have devastated me. After a week of uncertainty and outright fright over Sweetpea’s pancreatitis and the whopping bills that followed, I can barely work up a Well, sheeeeeit about the groundhog’s destruction. Today, I pulled up everything I could see for sure wouldn’t survive. Some plants may survive. I left those. Some will come back if the groundhog doesn’t. Next weekend, if I can see the groundhog has gone elsewhere to dine, I will replant the bed. In the meantime, we’ve placed new barriers where we believe the interloper was interloping.

You will be pleased to hear that today we observed Sweetpea is eating again and drinking water. Force-feeding her was taking a lot out of us, Pete in particular. We visited our favorite farmers today, who nodded sadly at our garden’s tale of woe and advised us to get a shotgun and a dog. Where we live, the houses are too close together for this, so we’re thinking about a pop gun and a Schnauzer. Pete feels that he’s missing out on some sort of manly hunting and trapping thing, but I’d prefer we toss some wilted lettuce on the neighbor’s open compost heap and stage whisper, “Look, no fence. However do they keep out sandwich-seeking groundhogs?” I think that could work.