A tangle of tracks in the yard: rabbit, cat, squirrel, mouse… I’m not picturing a children’s book, but each creature fearful and alone.
gray squirrel
Rain has erased the snow. High in a black locust, a squirrel is biting off twigs and carrying them into a crotch, building a bed of thorns.
A squirrel in the treetops pauses before it leaps, gazing, and loses its nerve. Below, bars of sunlight stretch across the pale blue ground.
0℉ with a wind. Over the creaks and moans of the trees, I can just make out the muffled cries of gray squirrels engaged in courtship.
Ground and sky are the same flat white aside from a smear of sun. Down-hollow, a mob of crows. A squirrel hurls itself through the treetops.
A great silence punctuated only by an occasional gun shot. A squirrel digs up a black walnut from beside the porch and bounds off with it.
In the steady rain, a gray squirrel is climbing all over the big tulip tree, as if searching for something. A raven goes croaking overhead.
Raindrops grow farther and farther apart until there are none. Three squirrels screech in counterpoint, a preaching choir of fear.
Rainy and warm. A paper wasp walks unsteadily back and forth on the bottom railing. Squirrels keep scolding some long-gone predator.
White sky, bright leaves, shivering on the branch as if in ecstasy. The sine wave of a gray squirrel’s tail and body bounding up the road.
In a lull between showers, a squirrel inches out along a slick black walnut twig. I decide the sound a falling walnut makes is SPLUD.
A squirrel on a walnut limb examines each nut but leaves without picking any. In the strong sunlight, the meteor streak of a wasp’s excreta.
Another cold, clear morning. When the jays and squirrels stop yammering, the silence seems unusually thick. Then it hits me: no crickets.
Two red-bellied woodpeckers locked in combat tumble out of a locust tree in the yard. Later, two squirrels angrily chase up and down it.