How two groundhog chucklings showed Sophie how to see the stories right out her back door.
By Sophie Burkhardt
My backyard is not particularly magical. My home is an ordinary house, on an ordinary street, in an ordinary small town in Virginia. There’s a bit of grass in the backyard, followed by a patch of trees which back up to a few other houses. Behind all that are the outlines of the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, which, alas, are hardly visible from the yard.
Unsurprisingly then, I gave little thought to the backyard when I first moved here. It was easy to overlook. That is, it was easy to overlook until, one morning, I noticed a groundhog. My mother christened him Leopold, and we soon discovered that he lived in a hole under the empty house next door.
Groundhogs are commonplace creatures in this town. They’re everywhere, and to most people, they’re pests. But I don’t have any sheds or structural foundations to worry about, so I’m free to admire the little critters in all their fuzzy, rotund glory. Now that I knew this groundhog as Leopold, my backyard became a magical place.
As I sat by my window and watched Leopold scamper around, I began to see all the other animals that regularly made visits to my yard: white-tailed deer, stray kittens, skunks, red-shouldered hawks, cardinals, blue jays, turkey vultures, northern flickers, and even the occasional pileated woodpecker. By stopping, watching, and listening, I began to see that my ordinary backyard was in fact a most magical place with all the creatures necessary to tell a story as enchanting as Peter Rabbit or Brambly Hedge.
That, then, is precisely what I set out to do. Near the end of last summer, my husband and I made a new discovery. There were two little chucklings (baby groundhogs) living in the remains of a vine-covered stump in the backyard. It was obvious to us that they must be Leopold’s niece and nephew, so, keeping with the Germanic theme, we named them Otto and Maria. We looked for them as often as we could, and as I paid ever closer attention to the rhythms of our backyard, I began writing a collection of short stories about the chucklings’ adventures.
Each of Otto and Maria’s adventures includes a “there and back again” movement into danger and then back home to the burrow. In one, Otto explores the abandoned house next door, only to come face to face with a snake. In another, Otto and Maria together venture into the dark woods behind the backyard, where they must flee an army of pesky squirrels before safely returning home.
While, of course, the stories about Otto and Maria are imaginative, they feature all the sights, sounds, and animals of our backyard. Born out of an intentional sitting in the ordinary, these stories have fostered within me a greater sense of the magic that my seemingly mundane backyard holds within it.
I’ve learned that close observation and imaginative storytelling lead to each other in a spiralling fashion that beckons us further up and further into the magic of the world around us. First, by closely observing all that lies within the confines of my small backyard, I found inspiration for my imagination to weave together stories to delight the children in my life with. Second, by writing these stories, my own perception of my backyard was further changed. Now that I associate the patch of trees with a dark wood that Otto and Maria had to journey through, I find those trees even more fascinating than I did before.
The careful use of all our senses to truly see, hear, smell, and touch our backyards tunes us into the richness of what is happening in these ordinary spaces. In the same way, stories transform these spaces into places of adventure in our imaginations and turn us back out into the real world to see it all afresh.
When I started observing my backyard, I found a world rife with the adventures of groundhogs. What stories might be waiting for you in your own ordinary backyard?
Sophie Burkhardt is finishing her Master of Arts in Theological Studies degree at Regent College, where she wrote her thesis on the role of fairy tales in children’s spiritual formation. She lives in a small town in Virginia with her law-student husband and teaches high school literature and philosophy.