Drive Slowly in My Neighborhood

I’ve seen more than one dead squirrel in my life. Who that lives among them hasn’t? But today I am crying for a poor little squirrel, young, digging for nuts, sniffing the almost spring air, deprived of summer sun.

My husband Don and I were about to go to the gym for our bi-weekly exercise when I glanced out the front window. There was a young squirrel, only one, alone, scurrying around on our front lawn. What a big fluffy tail it had, wider and longer than the usual it seemed to me.

“Look,” I said to Don. “Look at that squirrel’s tail! Isn’t it long?”

He glanced while putting on his coat. “Naw. They all have long tails. When I was a little kid my married sister had Persian cats. I thought squirrels were cats.”

I looked out the window again. The squirrel was foraging for something in the space between the grass and our front walk, then it hopped over the walk and continued its investigation on that side. I thought of the holes dug in the lawn, but somehow didn’t mind. I laughed to myself. Squirrels are nature’s lawn aerators. I wondered what they look for in the grass. Roots? Bugs? Probably nuts. I heard recently on good authority that squirrels do not remember where they bury their nuts. That would explain all the random digging.

“Happy hunting,” I thought.

Two hours later my husband and I returned from the gym. I drove up our street slowly preparing to turn into our driveway. It’s a busy street, a through street really, and too many people go too fast. A squirrel lay dead, hit by a car no doubt, in the middle of the road in front of our house. It made me cry. It’s just a squirrel, I told myself, thinking of a neighbor who hates them, but it wasn’t just a squirrel, it was our front yard squirrel.