It’s very civilized here. The houses have small lawns, in the back, and the small lawns back onto each other. Sunday we walked down the street to our neighbor’s house for a block party, during which we sat in the back yard on chairs under the trees with a view of everyone else’s backyard stretching down into the distance. Music played, the host passed out glasses of iced coffee sweetened with sugar and milk, and the children shot each other with water guns. This was very civilized, as well. Civilizations make war, of course, but I meant more that water guns were a good way, on a warm spring morning, to cool each other off. And water guns distracted the children, so the adults could talk.

Talk turned to the fox. There was a fox among us, in our back yards, killing squirrels, and causing the dogs down our row of back yards to bark. Our hostess had been feeding her children breakfast one morning when the fox had appeared in her yard, stalked and killed a squirrel, and started to tear it apart. When she opened her back door and asked it to go it picked up the carcass and trotted off. What a nice fox, everyone said. Clean and polite. Not like the squirrels, which eat crocus bulbs by the hundred. Not like coyotes, which live farther north, and will eat decent-sized dogs.

That was Sunday, and on Monday the four of us got into the car to drop Henry at school, then David at the train, then Johnny at school. Henry’s school is close by, almost directly behind our house, and as soon as we dropped Henry off we heard crows yelling and saw the fox, our fox, brown and silver, being chased by three crows. We were running late, but we stopped to shoo the crows off, and to offer the fox a ride. The fox accepted, hopping into the back and riding along as far as the little woods that runs by the parkway, where he said goodbye. I do hope we see him again. The crows are a nuisance, and do terrible things to the tomatoes, but as far as I’m concerned, the fox is a friend.