The squirrel tried to get back in the day after Kevin from Baystate Wildlife installed a series of one-way doors. A desperate clawing. First one dormer, then another. The creature’s insistence made us wonder if she’d left a nest behind. It is the season, after all.
Lying there in the early gray light of that first morning, my heart broke just a little. We hadn’t calculated on babies.
But it’s been a week now, and no mewling’s been heard, no smaller scratchings, no stench of death. The adult squirrel apparently merely wanted access to what we can only assume is a huge trove of black walnuts in our house.
Black walnuts, forever piled up and stuck between joists, drying out, acting perhaps as an additional layer of insulation. As long as they remain dry, this crisis is over. The squirrel can go back to filling the ice skates in the garage attic and all the ski boots. My ski boots might as well serve as nut holders since I won’t be using them again, which is a different story and not one I feel like telling.
Maybe there are no young because we trapped and killed the squirrel’s mate about a month ago. Should I have kept its fluffy red tail as a trophy? No, of course not. It gave me no satisfaction to see its limp body hanging off the edge of my rain boots — boots it might’ve been intending to fill with nuts.
The desperate, clawing along the gutters seems to have stopped too. I haven’t heard the clicky, scrambling across the roof either. Hunger must be driving our former roommate elsewhere — hunger being a mandate with no room for nostalgia.
“No one likes red squirrels,” Dale told us, Dale being Kevin‘s boss. “Not even grey squirrels like them.” Who knew?
Kevin, smiling, a job well done, told us to give it a few days. I was trying to listen and think about the calendar, but the smoothness of his skin was so lovely and there was a neck tattoo to look at.
How easily I’m distracted! There’s something squirrel-like in that. “Oh, look another story about the partisan hacks on the Supreme Court.” Or, “ Oh, I just remembered there’s a fresh crisp, Pink Lady in the fridge.”
Not all distractions are bad — it’s how much sway we give them. Eating the apple, reading about how a certain ruling will overturn 25% of the J6 convictions, can be tolerated as long as the dog still gets walked, the taxes filed.
Most of the satisfaction from the newly returned silence in our living room, from the sure and final exile of an intruder, comes from knowing that a problem long-tolerated, long-worried over, is finally over. Fixed.
We can’t as a nation can’t have that, apparently — the long-tolerated worrisome thing finally fixed. Instead, we get the failure of recusal at the highest level and also at the highest level, dickering over the meaning of “or otherwise,” which I would’ve thought was clear enough, even say, for an eighth grader studying sentence structure.
So we can’t have a settled, proper righteous result. In fact, it may be that the proper righteous result of imprisoned insurrectionists that served as a deficient stand in for the imposition of consequences on the bigger players, will also be denied us.
I like that the biggest player, the biggest nastiest pest this nation has ever known, falls asleep during his criminal proceedings. It reveals his weakness. It reveals his ill health, his age, his intolerance for matters out of his control.
If only Kevin could install a one-way door that our national monster could crawl out of never to return, how much better I would sleep!
