Dreaming of Skunks

"Skunk Dreams", by Louise Erdrich is an intimate writing showing the comfort and love that is felt from routine and past.  It starts with a story of the main character getting stuck sleeping next to a skunk at age fourteen.  She explains the anxiety and terror that she had sleeping next to the skunk.  The vicious animal left its scent on her body.  She then starts to analyze her thoughts about dreams and death starting with the skunk.  She thinks about what skunks dream about , and then human dreaming and death.   One line I found very interesting was, " I want something of the self on who I have worked so hard to survive the loss of the body." This caught my attention because it always seems we want more. Why can't she just accept the long and lovely life she was to live. It seems as if we always want to get more and more, the more we have the more we want. As the essay continues, she then explains her moving to New Hampshire and how unsatisfying it was. She dreamed of home and it seemed as if she was trapped in a world that wasn't hers. Nature was her natural high and she wanted to feel that high more and more as she was away from it longer. It truely prooved that "home is where the heart is". No matter how much a person says they want to leave home and never come back, there is always a point when one must return home. It has a comfort indescribable. No matter how hard she tried to get the same feeling from home, she was never fully satisfied. I feel as if that is what life is made of. We always want to be satisfied and love the life we live. Without that satisfaction, we aren't even "truly" living.