A peripatetic list of words I've looked up #7.

variegated — many-coloured

In reference to a woman I once knew whose eyes changed colors depending on her mood and the time of day. Found via a ponderous slog through the biggest thesaurus I could find at the New York Public Library, winter 2009-10.

photo by mararie, licensed via creative commons

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crepuscular — like twilight; dim; of an animal, active at dawn and dusk.

I used to have raccoons that came around my house and poked about in my garbage, after whatever food I might have thrown away there. I could never imagine what it was that they were finding (we had a garbage disposal at that place), or why they didn’t just come in through the cat door and eat the cat’s food, which sat out on kitchen floor for the taking all night — the cat, my partner, and I all slept on the same bed, in an upstairs room with the door closed, and would have been essentially helpless to stop them.

But no, they liked those garbage cans. I used all kinds of tactics to dissuade them — I tied the garbage cans shut, bought ones that latched, left on the lights in the driveway, used this spray that was supposed to be repellent to them in odor. None of it worked. Ultimately, I found myself spending an entire spring night lurking under the dogwood tree in the dark, a hose poised to fire at the slightest sign of procyonian movement. The temperature hung in the low 50s, the dogwood was blooming, and it took every ounce of my willpower to keep my teeth from chattering and my nose from ejaculating a voluble series of sneezes.

Finally, as the sun was just humming a little tune along the horizon, I saw them. They were a family: two full-grown ones poking about in front and behind, and two small ones tumbling over each other in between their guardians. I thought of them as mother-father-children in that moment, though a little more research indicates that they were probably something other than the traditional nuclear family of American fantasy — raccoons live in groups generally segregated by gender, so what I probably had was two mothers and two babies. And here’s the thing: they were cute. Very. But then they began systematically to dismantle my latched, rope-tied garbage cans, and no matter how cute they were, I wasn’t going to tolerate another incident that left trash strewn all over the yard and driveway. I let fly with that hose, and in a veritable hurricane of screeches and wild staring eyes they scattered.

I found myself laughing out there in the crepuscule, alone, waving a hose, cold, my nose running. I was mad with my victory — not least because it turned out, inevitably, to be temporary. Days later they were back. My taste for long cold nights away from my cat and my person could not be re-stoked, and in the end we all tolerated occasional storms of raccoon-wreck until we moved out of that house, quite a while later.

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pulchritude — beauty

Oh, you. Of course you.