Cold rain and fog. A squirrel disappears into the old flicker den hole in the dead elm, that smooth, ruined column at the edge of the yard.
gray squirrel
It’s the absence of sound that makes a snowstorm so disquieting. A squirrel plows its way through snow-laden treetops—a slow-moving cascade.
A squirrel leaps out of a tree, falls 20 feet to the ground and runs off. The dog stares mournfully at a pool of bile she’s just thrown up.
Bright sun on bare trees, whose discarded leaves still glow. Squirrels scold on and on. Finally a hawk-shaped shadow detaches from an oak.
It has stopped raining. The squirrel with pale fur forages at the edge of a small, marooned cloud. The sky brightens and releases more rain.
Shirt-sleeve weather. A squirrel unearths a walnut from the yard in that casual way squirrels have of pretending it’s doing something else.
The fog is a bad magician. Each time it lifts, it reveals the same trees and snow, the same skinny squirrels, the same two crows jeering.
An ostinato of dripping on the porch roof. The fog advances, retreats. Somewhere a deer snorts. Drenched squirrels bound over the slush.
Steady sleet. A squirrel bores into the frozen earth to retrieve a black walnut, then schleps the battered, lumpy thing into the treetops.
In the stillness, the rasp of squirrel teeth. Then the hollow thonk, thonk of a dropped walnut hitting the limbs of an oak on its way down.
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.
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.