Last night I left a basket of moldy cherries out in the yard. They were destined for the compost heap, but what with one thing and another, they didn’t make it. Normally I don’t leave food, even spoiled and fuzzy, barely edible food, outdoors, because we have our share of mysterious wildlife waiting to pounce after dark.

Most are of the long-tailed variety, silent and voracious. When it’s really hot, we get the bigger critters, the ones who bump against the garbage cans and chairs.

I still haven’t ruled out the occasional gnome, experiencing hard times and in need of a bite now and then. I also left my box of seed packets outside over the weekend, and something tore into a package of sugar snap pea seeds and didn’t clean up after themselves, tsk. The pea seeds are somewhat meatier than say, a tomato seed.

But back to the cherries. Digging compost is not my favorite thing to do on a warm day because sandals don’t like sinking into compost. When I looked at the basket from inside this morning, they seemed unmolested.

Tonight I checked again. What I didn’t see this morning was the pile of cherry pits on the other side of the basket.