Can-Coon

I was on the road pre-dawn this week and spotted the nightly activity of a local raccoon.

All I could do was laugh and think…Florida.

What a crazy place. Every joke they make about “Florida man” seems to be well earned, at least in the central Florida region I have been lucky enough to visit.

To be fair, I wasn’t even in Florida when this happened. But, I was immediately warped back in time to Can-Coon’s house.

Can-Coon actually lived outside the house with his family of five. He was, as you may have a guessed, a raccoon.

As many of my sales calls go, I was at the house of an elderly woman. She was vibrant and alert, but her husband was ill and dependent on a constant supply of oxygen.

Momma Coon was his wife and now caretaker. It seems she had been so for quite some time.

This was a midday call on a sunny afternoon in Florida, not the nocturnal setting in which raccoons are usually spotted.

We chatted for about 10-minutes at her kitchen table when, suddenly, I heard a light knocking on her sliding glass door.

There he was. Can-Coon. He stood on his hind legs, front paws pressed against the glass. Precious - in a dirty, rabies, trash-eating kind of way.

Momma Coon was excited to see her and tell me all about her.

Do you see her paw?

I looked down at the paw not pressed against the glass and noticed a swollen flop of a paw dangling from the end of its front right leg. Every once in a while Can-Coon would flop it up against the glass to knock again.

Fighting back the urge to verbalize my shock and disgust at this limp-wristed rodent, I inquired, ever so politely, if the raccoon was alright. Momma informed me his paw was the source of his name. When she first spotted him, it was trapped inside of a Coca-Cola can.

By the time it was removed, the damage was done. The paw remained a useless, swollen, flapping, piece of flesh he drug along with him everywhere he went.

From then on, she tended to Can-Coon, named him, and kept him fed, hence his presence at the door.

After a while, Can-Coon had a litter of baby-coons, and Momma Coon discovered he was not a he at all, but a female, and a Momma Coon herself.