I'm Shira Erlichman and this is The Slowdown.

The night a raccoon jumped on the hood of our car.

It's eyes electric.

All of us screaming inside the vehicle.

I couldn't get to my bedroom fast enough.

I opened my diary like I was an international reporter on deadline.

The next day at school I told every classmate, extra extra, we live in a wild, unpredictable

flying raccoon world.

These days when I see a raccoon digging through a New York trash can, does it set off a

wild wonder in me?

Does it make the front page?

Does it change my conception of the world?

There's something particularly humbling about how a child's mind works at organizing the

world.

When I was little, there was an old church down the street.

Whenever we walked by it, my younger brother was terrified.

In his mind, the long rusted spindle coming from the roof and the dark paint job added

up to one terrifying conclusion, a witch's castle.

The same year my brother avoided the witch's street, I kept a moon journal for a first grade

class project.

I wrote vivid notes about the far away figure changing outside my window.

But the time I spent considering the moon was so much more than note-taking.

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