Possom, persimmon, home

So maybe this is why the persimmon harvest has been so meager... I was heading out to the compost heap at around 10 this evening, and as my headlight swept the edge of the woods, I noticed, high up in the Meader Persimmon I'd planted more than a decade ago—a now 25-foot-tall tree that never bore all that well—eyeshine. My guess was it is was one of our cats, but when I got close enough to actually see the climber, I spotted a quite content Opossum clinging to the branches. The marsupial didn't look especially nervous, so I didn't think it had been treed by a feline, and I hadn't heard any coyote howling, so it probably wasn't climbing upwards to save its life. But when I brought Pam outside to see the possum, she took one look and said, "It's after those persimmons, I'll bet." I had to agree. We've had a modest frost, enough to turn the bitterness of that lip-puckering fruit to sugar, and it would appear that at least one possum has gotten the message.