So, What Happened With The Squirrel?

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A story needs its climax, or it isn’t a story.  It’s a tell-about or a ramble or a flat-line, unsatisfying at best, provoking at worst.

Here is the climax to the epic of the squirrel on the back porch.

I did not actually “go in” when I said I was.  I chickened out.  Something about climbing the ladder and being at eye level with an unpredictable, strong-willed, female animal, no matter the size, completely cowed me.  Plus the possibility of encountering some soggy babies, pink, mewling, and blind, made me retract like a turtle.  If a woman can be said to be unmanned, I was.

Who knows where ideas come from, especially simple, self-evident ones.  But I remembered at that moment that I have an 18-year-old son.   Isn’t rat-removal what sons are for??  Isn’t rat-removal a small thing to ask after, well, everything starting with morning sickness up ‘til the most recent load of post-soccer-practice laundry? Soccer practice being the reason he wasn’t home at the moment, I had to wait until the next morning on the way to school to officially commission him.

“Soldier,” I said, “Take that hill!”

And I decamped to my bivouac to watch the progress via binoculars.

Out he strode that afternoon to do battle, cheerful and willing, but hurrying because he and his mates were on the way to Taco Bell to get one of those new concoctions said to be bigger than the internet.  He wore his welding goggles and gloves.  A squirrel sat out in the yard up on her haunches, watching, pretending to eat a left-over pecan.  Was it her?  Our squirrel? Was it her henchwoman and spy?  Was our squirrel even now in the nest, awaiting the first nestquake, claws at the ready?

The hungry, Taco Bell-bound warrior on the ladder knocked twice on the beam, scooped up two loads of pine straw and my shredded chair cushions, deposited them in the herb garden, and cantered off to Tex-Mex heaven.

So, no, no rabid attack, no soggy babies, just me in the anticlimax realizing that it is perfectly ok to devolve unpleasant tasks onto one of the kids and lose none of my self-respect.

~

Journal Of The Squirrel And Me

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Monday afternoon, 1:20 p.m.  I just now looked the squirrel in the eye.  She is enjoying the 70 degree weather as much as I am and is not even trying to tippy-toe around the rafters of our screened porch where she has built an admirable, protected nest that evidences not survival of the fittest, but God’s common grace.  From that perch, her offspring will have a long and prosperous reign over their inheritance.

For several weeks she snuck around at night pulling the stuffing out of the furniture until the fabric hung gnawed and the polyester filling frothed out.  The porch chairs look like flayed rabies victims.  But now that Andrew, b-b gun expert among other things, is off studying in St. Louis,  the squirrel veritably whistles as she works in broad daylight, carrying the chair cushions into the rafters nibble by nibble and dropping as much on the tile floor until my porch is more to her liking, more hamster-cagey. Cheeky, as Mary Poppins would say.

I didn’t begrudge her the chair cushions.  They were in their dotage.  But when I saw evidence of her pickage at the new coverings on the swing and couch, the question became what to do.

One of the many ways to divide humanity is into:
A) those who would never move the nest (possible babies; I’m in her habitat and not vice versa, blah, blah, blah), and
B) those whose only question is should I put on goggles while I do it (germs, maternal claws).

I come from a long line of group B, and storms are coming in tomorrow night. So my window of time is short, and I must engage.  It is not enough to hope the pecan tree breathes its last and falls in a lashing wind to obliterate the porch and its rodent. No, I’ve got the ladder in place, rubber gloves on, the broom in hand.  Courage.  Courage and faith.

I’m going in.