Skunks in the Rain

Last night, we had one wild storm. Very strong winds, lashing rains, and loud thunder that sent Bubastis running for the basement. For an hour, myself, my lovely spouse, and all of our kitty children huddled in the sitting room and waited for the worst of it to pass. When it did, I looked outside — and what did I see?

Skunks. Two of them. The one I saw first was already on his way home through our longer grasses and was graced with the thinnest tail that I have ever seen on a skunk. The second one we saw a bit later as it rooted around on our veranda looking for leftover birdseed and damp insects. Skunks are cute little things and my lovely spouse’s research tells me that they love to cavort and gambol in the rain. However, it does make relocating post-storm spiders very inconvenient and threateningly stinky.

Strange Nostalgia

I was late when it comes to the world of Moomin, only encountering it in my mid-twenties when I was really delving into the world of independent and vintage comics. While I’ve since mostly left that behind me, I saw this new collection from Drawn and Quarterly and couldn’t quite resist the impulse purchase — even though I do have another copy in a larger format.

While I wasn’t alive in the 1950s and 1960s, I do have a kind of nostalgia for this kind of art. My grandparents had a lot of decor and books from that era and I was constantly in the presence of media produced more than twenty years before my time. I also have a love for this kind of writing. Moomin stories are ones that are simply an adventure with lots of humour and some very lighthearted social commentary. 

Favourite Stories

It’s hard to choose a favourite, but I do love ‘Moomin on the Riviera’ which is a thinly veiled critique of the resort life enjoyed by the obscenely wealthy. ‘Artists in Moominvalley’ is also a favourite since it’s a lampoon of the artists’ colony and the artistic community and its foibles.

Each story consists of around 70 comic strips and, though each one can be enjoyed individually as they all have some kind of a punchline or comment, somehow Jansson also makes them consecutive and united enough to make a beautiful little graphic novella. 

A Caveat

I have heard Moomin described as a good book series to get children who are starting to show an interest in reading. I’ve even met a few people who actually learned to read with Moomin books and have only fond memories of this. But, as an adult, I can remember being a bit dismayed by the idea. Moomin is a great comic, but it is dated in several key ways, most of which have to do with the treatment of women and the stereotypes that were acceptable more than half of a century ago but which are no longer. Nostalgia is all well and good, but only if you know and are familiar with the caveats of 1970s humour and fiction.

So, if you’re planning on gifting Moomin to a younger reader, I would recommend at least reading it yourself first to determine whether it’s appropriate for your particular little reader. Some context and supervision might be advisable.

Rain Clean-Up

The bird-feeding area has to be dismantled when we get any high winds and the pots we keep in the garden in have to be shuffled around so that they are not thrown around. It takes about twenty minutes on the morning after a storm to put things to rights and feel like everything is back in place. This morning, it’s going to take more than twenty minutes because one of the skunks left us a gift in one of the window wells.

Nature is so lovely.