A woman on a November morning is watching a squirrel beneath her window. In a small patch of dirt and grass and sunshine she sees him foraging. If asked she would be hard pressed to describe the color of his fur. It is a shifting landscape of grey, brown, white and black. His tail is a dancing plume. Everything about him is quick, alert, vigorous. He is alive, she thinks to herself, in a way that it is hard to be alive if you have been sitting in front of a screen much of the day instead of sprinting up and down tree trunks scouting out the choicest acorns and burying them in secret caches. Every so often he stands up on his hind legs and looks around to ensure that neither the government nor the blue jays are spying on him. [Just to be safe he relocates his stash a couple of times]. When he stands up, his front paws that functioned until that moment as legs, instantly become hands. In this stance he looks, astonishingly, like a little person. He picks things up, examines and eats them in a way that is quite human. But his jaw works more rapidly than any person alive. She marvels at his resourcefulness and pragmatism. This ability to find food in backyard flora and the foresight he has to put aside a portion of it for leaner times. She has read that squirrels, while admirably meticulous about burying their acorns, have a less than impeccable track record when it comes to retrieval. Lost in the myriad details of the squirrely life they are known to foolishly forget where they left their loot, in the way that humans stumbling out of airports and shopping malls, have trouble remembering where they parked their cars. But squirrel hoarding is not the same as human hoarding. Squirrels for instance have not been known to open Swiss bank accounts or shop at Costco. Also their hoarding habits frequently result in the birth of oak trees. It can be said with reasonable surety that human hoarding has yet to yield any such magnificent outcomes. And it occurs to her suddenly that human greed and negligence have destroyed forests that the squirrels’ acquisitive and forgetful nature helped plant. And it is at this precise moment that the squirrel beneath her window looks up. With a gaze so clear-eyed, vibrant, and empty of accusation, that she feels at once chastened and forgiven on behalf of her kind.
The Poetry Of 
November 25th, 2014 at 1:31 pm
Beautifully stated! Thank you for bringing squirrels into the oft neglected realm of honored teachers!!!
November 25th, 2014 at 2:14 pm
I love it! One of your best ones yet!
November 25th, 2014 at 3:20 pm
This is lovely. I went on a small journey, an aside if you will, and found myself wondering… If there were a memory spectrum that has a goldfish at three seconds and an elephant at forever where would the squirrel find its range?
November 25th, 2014 at 4:27 pm
Beauuutifulll! 🙂
November 25th, 2014 at 4:31 pm
The day feels brighter after having read this captivating encounter with the squirrel. As always, thanks for writing.
November 25th, 2014 at 4:36 pm
Nice little observation
November 25th, 2014 at 4:54 pm
So beautifully observed & written. And so true! This is lovely!
November 25th, 2014 at 7:58 pm
Splendid. Splendid. splendid
November 25th, 2014 at 9:24 pm
Thank you !
November 26th, 2014 at 2:11 am
Only you could think of squirrels and swiss bank accounts in the same breath and link them so magically 🙂
November 26th, 2014 at 2:32 am
Lovely ! Reminded me of my day of squirrel observation where I took lots of pictures of them and they posed too !
November 26th, 2014 at 3:47 am
I honestly will not look at squirrels the same, ever. I love your poetic verse, which takes us to a place of insight that leaves us permanently changed, and that’s an accomplishment, especially with humans!
November 27th, 2014 at 8:14 am
I enjoyed reading it so much! Thank you.