There are three small dead squirrels lying on the sidewalk around the corner from my house. Actually one looks really dead and the other two are breathing but we can tell that dead is where they’re heading. My housemate is an obsessive lover of animals; I’m afraid she’ll come out walking the dog and want to save the squirrels or see them and freak out.

I think about the latest environmental bellweather about bees dying; are now squirrels falling out of trees? They are clearly baby squirrels, which I have never seen before, like where do baby squirrels live until they are large enough to shimmy up my bird feeders or eat all the tomatoes from the garden or hurl themselves against the window when I have suet out in the winter?

The woman I’m walking with who is young, pansexual and wearing a nose ring says we need to kill them, which I am sure I am not prepared to do so I go up to the neighbors house and Clyde is home and he comes out to look and the first thing he says is he’ll kill them and take care of it which is interesting to me in that “would every guy say that straightaway”? Definitely not the first place I went. And then he reminds me that they may be babies without a mother and I remember that he has been trapping squirrels and letting them go at the Chart House, an upscale restaurant with a view up the road from our house.

I didn’t want to linger. And I do. [Read more…]