My younger daughter saw me peering out the window one night and came and joined me. I put my arm around her as we watched the possum sniff around the back yard.

After a few minutes she said, “Can we catch it?”

“No. It might have rabies. Even if it doesn’t, it might bite.”

She watched for a few more minutes. “It looks lonely.”

I could feel the thin bones of her shoulders beneath my arm, her heart beating in her frail chest. “It’s not lonely. It’s a possum.”

She looked at me, her eyes the same color as mine. “Possums don’t get lonely?”

A strand of hair had fallen from where she hooked it behind her ears. “They’re animals.”

“So are we,” she said, and I was forced to agree, but kept my thoughts to myself. I would argue that since we wear pants we get to be more important than lower creatures, but that may be my animal-prejudice rearing up. Also, does wearing pants mean we do not get lonely? Or that creatures without them don’t as well?

In the six years we have lived in this house, our back yard has grown smaller. When we first moved, it was the size of a gas station or a dance floor. There is a small hill behind the house, and bamboo grows on the side of the hill. I like the Asian feeling, so over the years I have let the bamboo slowly and steadily march down the hill. I am also lazy when it comes to yard work, and each time I mow the back yard, I mow a little bit less, allowing the bamboo shoots and kudzu to creep a little further in, so now the back yard is about the size of a college dorm room. The kudzu adds a Southern feel, which mixes with the bamboo so that the back yard seems both Asian and Southern. I am thinking of adding a koi pond but stocking it with catfish, or crappie.

My wife spends much less time thinking about the possum than I do. My daughters are the same way. After the first time I showed the possum to them, they became uninterested.

There is a thin strip of trees that run behind our house, and all down the block. It is not much, but a tiny divider between houses, so that in the spring and summer, when the leaves are full on the trees, we can’t see the houses behind us. I grew up in rural Arkansas, and the trees in the back yard screening me from other houses are welcome.

I suppose they are welcome to the possum too. I know wild animals adapt easily to life in the city, but began to wonder if cutting down all the trees and bush-hogging the back yard would make the possum feel unwanted.

My wife spends much less time thinking about the possum than I do. My daughters are the same way. After the first time I showed the possum to them, they became uninterested. I would see it in the back yard and rush to tell them.

“Is it the possum again?” my older said.

“No,” I told her. “It’s a giant rabbit wrecking havoc around the neighborhood, eating small children.”

She rolled her eyes and went back to doing homework.

“We’ve seen it,” my younger daughter said, equally non-excited. She was curled on the couch reading, and she is hard to talk to when she is reading, reluctant to pull herself out of the world she has entered.

“But it’s cute,” I reminded her. “Remember?”

She didn’t look up. “You said it had rabies.”

“Might,” I said. “Might have rabies. But it doesn’t.”

She read for a moment, then marked her spot with a finger. “How do you know?”

“If it had rabies, it would have eaten you,” I said.

She put her face back in her book. “It would have eaten you first,” she said, to which I could not argue.