One of my friends challenged me to write about squirrels. Here goes.
Squirrel Stew
Last year a squirrel with a freakishly long tail, thin as a branch, made it his mission to molest as many animals in the backyard as possible. He chased the other littermates up trees and along wires, ran point blank at a flabbergasted rabbit, swung his tail at crows and finches, and camped in the cedar waiting for new victims. This year I don’t see him. Perhaps he served as a hawk snack, or met his end under an SUV. Bagheera waits on the window sill, hoping for the trickster’s return, the flash of his flexible whip tail like a propeller by the side of the house. In his vigil, Bagheera evokes Kitty and Circe, all suffering cats imported to Michigan from Arizona, along with an infant Lizzie, pets who — after years of desert freedom — all at once found themselves prisoners in a third floor apartment, watching overfed squirrels waddle up from the balcony below to taunt them from behind the safety of the slider. One climbed the screen and presented his round belly, grinning with curved yellow teeth. At night the squirrels’ kits scraped and chittered in our thin walls, nesting in the building’s cheap innards. Our downstairs neighbors, a bitter pair of retirees, fed the rodents handfuls of seed, banged on our ceiling and knocked on our door, ordered us to keep Lizzie from walking over their ancient heads. Kitty began to die. The building across from ours caught on fire, smoldered for an afternoon. Our squirrel feeding neighbors complained about Lizzie’s running overhead. We moved away, at last, and landed here, where only mice found their way into our house, and that building we once lived in, that paper apartment over the chewing squirrels and their withered guardians, burned to the ground.
