Where do you feel safest? Where least?

                  Fair warning: I pose this question ignorant of my answer. These are the sort of questions I enjoy. I’m convinced the answer exists, but I must dig for it, as Henry for a buried bone. Excavation leads to revelation. Any finding gratifies, widening my awareness. I feel not smart but slightly smarter, headed in an OK direction.

                  Our animal neighbors suggested this line of inquiry. Small birds, rodents, insects, frogs seem perpetually anxious. I’m hoping they relax in their nests, but I wouldn’t know. Henry is often easy – he is supine beside me now, on his back, snoring, almost louchely loose-limbed – yet awake is easily roused to piercing barking. When it’s a visitor or the Amazon guy, we commend his vigilance, but if his jeopardy feels fantastic or, worse yet, gratuitous, we chide, “Shush, pup, it’s nothing.” This is unjust. His fears are as real to him as ours to us. When we yelp scrolling the news, Henry eyes us puzzled.

                  Relative size and perceived risk seem the chief causes of alarm. The bigger the creature, the fewer predators lurk.  Bears, elephants, and I face fewer physical perils than littler guys. Security assessment sets level of alarm. A bear prowling our deck we may find amusing (Jane more than I); a bear indoors would be another matter.

                  A delightful domestic drama chez Quinn-Tucker is Henry versus the deer. Pretty deer fancy our field, where gazing is plentiful and hunters forbidden. The deer’s elegance delights, provided they don’t approach our shrubs and flowers. Henry views deer as interlopers. They do not so much threaten as insult his amour propre. Deer in the surrounding forest, OK, that’s their ghetto and welcome to it, but the idea of them venturing into his domain is just, well, I mean really!

                  In spring, when the field below the lawn is mowed, Henry barrels across it and the deer skedaddle. Henry returns to the house with the swagger of a gunslinger puffing his Colt. Midsummer, the tall grass bars Henry like a brick wall. He can bark at the deer but not pursue them. They look up curiously – amused, one can’t help thinking – then return to their placid repast. Henry trudges home in a funk. Life is so unfair.

                  The unexpected is another source of alarm to man and beast. What is that noise, footstep, smell! When dishes or drinking glasses are misshelved, I think, hmmm, who’s been busy here, for the kitchen is my kingdom. When our government picks our purse or pilfers our rights, we say uh-oh, even if, for now, our loss is hypothetical. A principal cause of Americans’ present distress is the sense, worse daily, this isn’t the country we had in mind.

                  Humans alone, I think, suffer imaginary fears. A mandatory cocktail party may pose no discernible risk to my person or pride, but how I grump at its occurrence. Mock me for overreacting, and I’ll agree with you, yet persist in my objections. “Let’s call in sick,” I suggest, knowing we’d never think of it. Then having enjoyed myself, I blush to recall my jitters. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

                  Where I’m safest is relaxing with Jane – playing a game, watching a movie, reading in bed – or here, with my words. I curl into my words like a squirrel into its hole. Saying makes me feel momentarily impregnable. Actuality assails: “Human kind,” I often quote T.S. Eliot, “cannot bear very much reality.” But if I can make sense sweetly, with euphonious syllables, for the nonce, like Orpheus, I’ve piped my demons asleep.