Rocket the Raccoon

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This is a very short story about our neighborhood raccoon.

When neighbor Julie, walking her dog Patches, joined Joyce and me, she asked, “Have y’all seen a raccoon around lately?”

I replied that I caught one on the cam a few days ago. It was actually only two days ago.

“Well,” she said, “he is no more. He’s dead. I named him Rocket.”

Julie continued, telling us her two dogs barked at the ‘coon, and she went back in the house. She went outside alone to shoo it away, and it started walking toward her! That’s a warning sign when a wild animal approaches you. A delivery truck pulled into the driveway. The driver dropped the box he was delivering to her, and then he accidentally killed the raccoon by driving over it.

Julie said, “He died right there in my driveway!”

Here is my clip of the live action from the camera:

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Published by Anne Mehrling

I'm a retiree who loves to write about life in the mountains of North Carolina.

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38 thoughts on “Rocket the Raccoon”

  5. I’ll bet that someone in the neighborhood was feeding it and it got too familiar with people and was running up to people looking for food. Next door had two of them, mother and baby, in his trash can one night. He pulled the car into the driveway and the headlights spooked them and they looked up – it’s the kind of rolling trash can that flips up – they flipped up the lid and were digging around inside. That’s sad it died – it might have been rabid too and that’s why it approached. Better than a black bear!

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      1. That’s scary, but I remember you had photos of it too. I followed a weather forecaster on social media and he had a large hummingbird feeder and a bear used to visit after dark to drink from it. He would post videos from his Ring camera showing the bear tipping the feeder over to drink from the ports. He alerted the DNR and they arrived that night, tranquilized the bear and took it far away from the neighborhood.

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                  1. We are now at 71 degrees and we have bad weather tonight thru Tuesday night fueled by this heat. I was content if it stayed cooler. We now have rain every day thru Easter Sunday. The grass will be green anyway.

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                    2. Well I’m at more uneasy when it is at night/overnight. This tomorrow will be an all-day affair, supposedly done by 11:00 p.m. … that’s still dark but the last few years, since the downed wire fire, if it is storming or bad weather is predicted I won’t go to bed, even though I have a weather alarm. A few weeks ago I was up until 4:00 a.m. and the next day or two days later until 2:00 or 2:30 when we had a lot of stormy activity.

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                    4. Yes, they will … the downed wire fire was at 11:30 p.m. – I was not allowed back in the house until after 2:00 a.m. It was lucky that it was a mild Winter day, that’s for sure. I follow a retired meteorologist who says tomorrow’s storm has more potential that all the other Spring storms. I didn’t like hearing that – in the western part of the state they had three tornados on March 6th and the town of Union City was decimated.

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                    6. Yes, it did not help my uneasiness about high winds. Every time we clock winds at 39 mph or better, I am on edge. Marge’s tree snapped in two and my shed rolled over and fell apart at 39 mph. back in 2019 and the downed wire fire it was 39 mph winds. I went back and looked the next day on a weather site.

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                    8. You’re lucky for that – we have been having strong winds the last year, several times a week and even though I’m tall and am not likely to get knocked off balance, you sometimes have to brace yourself when walking. We had a seiche at Lake Erie around Christmas time. It doesn’t happen often, but the winds were gusting at about 60 mph consistently and it pushed the water to one side of the lake – it was quite remarkable to see. I watched videos of it online because it looked like low tide and the waters were up to eight feet deep and all gone. People found car motors, a snowmobile and a guy found a class ring lost 40 years ago. People were walking on the lakebed looking for treasures.

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                    10. Yes, it was quite amazing. The TV stations covered it and I watched all the coverage – people walking around treasure hunting on the lake bed of Lake Erie in the month of December!

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