Art, Caroline Crabtree

Squirrel Stories

Rita Schneider

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A book that I loved when I was just beginning to learn to read had a poem that started “Squirrel, squirrel in the park, your tail is like a question mark.” I like watching squirrels hop around swishing their question mark tails. Squirrels played a part in our life when our three boys were growing up. A squirrel family lived in a tree in the yard and the boys, probably because they didn’t have a dog or a cat, trained one of the squirrels they named Frederick to do tricks. Frederick would climb up the torso of one of the boys and pluck a peanut from a shoulder, or a head. Dave, our youngest son, was especially clever about thinking up new tricks. I thought it was amusing to watch the boys play with their squirrel until one evening at dusk, as I walked out the back door with a bag of garbage, Frederick jumped on my head. I came very close to having a heart attack. Since none of us knew how to “untrain” an animal, someone else was assigned to garbage detail. Unknown to his parents, Tom, our middle son, who had a hard time getting up in the morning, would sometimes open the window in the upstairs bedroom he shared with Dave, then spread peanuts over his covers before he went to sleep. At first light, Frederick would climb in the window and scamper over Tom’s bed until all the peanuts were collected and Tom was wide awake. This apparently worked well for him until one morning when my mother-in-law, who was visiting from Portland and enjoying her second cup of coffee in the living room, saw a squirrel run down the steps from upstairs. Frederick, instead of climbing out of Tom’s bedroom window, found his way downstairs and was running around the living room in a panic looking for a way outside. We explained to Tom that wild animal were only at home out of doors, and he promised to use an alarm clock. One summer morning, John, the oldest of the trio, got up early to go fishing with his friend Tim. Someone told him that worms were good bait, so he found a trowel and was prepared to dig in the back yard. Instead, he came running into our bedroom with the trowel still in his hand, calling, “Mom, come see what’s in the yard.” Under a madrone tree that curved out over a grassy spot in the yard lay two furry brown balls, baby squirrels no bigger than a child’s fist. They had apparently fallen out of their nest in the tree and were lying in the grass making newborn baby noises of distress. John was afraid that the cat next door would discover the babies before

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their mother realized they were gone, so I stood guard while he went down to the basement to get an old cage we had used for pet gerbils at one time. He placed the balls of fur into the cage and we went into the kitchen and watched through the window while we had breakfast. Before we finished our cereal, a squirrel that John recognized as Frederick appeared and was running around the cage making noises like a worried mom. John removed the babies from the cage and placed them on the grass. Mother then picked up one of her babies in her teeth, jumped up on the rockery, scampered up the curved trunk of the tree and disappeared into the foliage. She then returned for the second precious fur ball and transported it up the tree in her capable teeth. Frederick’s name was immediately changed to Frederica. We watched several families of squirrels as they chased each other around the yard during mating season, gather bits of dried grass at new building time, and finally little squirrels growing up. Frederica, as she grew older began to display rather bizarre behavior. Sometimes when I stumbled out to put the coffee on in the morning, I would see her hanging upside down from the molding around the back door looking in the window to watch my breakfast preparation. She would make giant leaps onto a ledge where peanuts were sometimes placed and had a temper tantrum when a blue jay flew off with “her” peanut. I figured she was probably going through menopause. When the boys grew up and left home, husband Tom would sometimes put peanuts on the ledge for the squirrels. Then his doctor told him he shouldn’t eat peanuts, he stopped buying them. The squirrels were put on a diet as well and stopped coming around. I still watch them swishing their question mark tails. I just don’t know them personally anymore. Caroline Crabtree

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Lynne Wasson

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