The Visitor

This morning Val came downstairs and asked me to peer out into the soccer field behind our house to see if I could recognize something about 50 yards beyond our fence. It looked like a grey, medium sized animal, like a badger. It had a bit of a round, lopsided look, so I revised my guess to an armadillo, who, having been abducted from his native Southwestern home, and having regained conscious in the middle of a field in New Jersey, endeavored to curl up in a ball and wait it out. However, the stillness of this mysterious figure struck me as being more plant than animal. I settled on a fungus instead, and wondered out loud if it might be a large mushroom - perhaps, the largest one on record in New Jersey - that sprang up amidst all of this rain. Neither my long distance glasses nor the zoom function on either of our phones was enough to resolve this mystery, so we put on our sneakers and cautiously trekked out to it, with Maggie barking from the patio in protest. It did not move as we drew closer. We slowed our pace to give it a chance to react while there was still some distance between us. When we were very close to being on top of it, we paused. The grey sky grew still. The birds grew quiet. Our senses sharpened, like our ancestors on the African plains.  It was an old, discolored and partially deflated basketball :-)