Free Essays of E. B. White by E. B. White Page B

about is no longer with us; she was ousted by another female (probably a younger one and perhaps her own daughter) after a fierce battle high in the tree at the entrance to the hole, both females being pregnant and ready to lie in. The new young coon, the one we have now, descends the tree headfirst but does not reverse when near the ground. She continues headfirst and steps off onto the lawn with one front foot. Moral: a man should not draw conclusions about raccoons from observing one individual. The day may come when we’ll have a coon that completes the descent of the tree with a half gainer.
    Every year the coon hole gets larger, from wear and tear and from the tendency of balm-of-Gilead trees to grow hollow in their old age. The chamber, or nursery, now boasts two openings, the big one that serves as entrance in the south face of the tree and a smaller one higher up in the northeast face. The smaller hole is of occasional interest to woodpeckers—hairies and pileateds—who stop by and inspect it. They peer in, and soon become agitated. If the chamber contains a raccoon with kittens, the visiting bird is jolted by the unexpected sight of live animals inside a tree. If no coons are there, I think the bird is surprised and disappointed by the light that enters from the larger aperture, making the chamber unnaturally bright and unsuitable for woodpecker occupancy.
    Last spring, when the young coons were about three weeks old, we had a torrential three-day rainstorm. It was so bad, even the coon hole shipped water. The mother made the hard decision to evacuate the young ones, which she did by carrying them, one by one, in her mouth down the tree and depositing them a few hundred yards down the road in a drier location under the floor of a neighbor’s house. Three days later in broad daylight she brought them all back and reinstated them—a monumental job of planning and execution over an obstacle course bristling with dogs, men, and vehicles. There were four kittens, which meant for her a total of fourteen trips over the road, all told.
    As for my kitchen, it is really two kitchens—the front one and the back one. The front kitchen, where the black stove is, has survived the pressures of time; it is the same as ever, warm, comfortable, convenient, and unimproved. The back kitchen, however, fell on evil days and modern appliances, as I knew it would eventually. It now looks like the setting for a television commercial. We removed the old black iron sink and substituted a shiny stainless one. We rebuilt the counters, covering them with Formica, or Micarta, or something that ends in “a,” I forget what. We threw out the old wooden drainboard, which had grown almost as soft as a sponge, and replaced it with a yellow rubber mat that has no pitch. We tore out the set tubs; in their place is an automatic washing machine that goes on the blink every five weeks and an automatic dryer that blows lint into the woodshed through an exhaust pipe every time it is used. Next to the new sink, under the counter, we installed an automatic dishwasher. This machine works quite nicely, but it celebrates each new phase of the wash with a great clanking noise; it grunts and groans incessantly at its labors, and it leaves a hot smell of detergent in the wake of its toil, so that when you pass it on your way out to the woodshed the air in the room tickles the inside of your nose. It takes the design off the china and leaves ring marks on the glassware. Strong detergents have replaced weak soaps in the back kitchen, vibration has replaced quietude, sanitation broods over all, the place smells of modernity and Ajax, and there is no place to wash the dog. (I give our current dachshund one bath a year now, in an old wash boiler, outdoors, finishing him off with a garden-hose rinse. He then rolls in the dirt to dry himself and we are where we started.)
    I liked the back kitchen better the way it was before we improved it,