Making Me Bullwinkle, I Guess

This year we've had a mild winter-that's an observation and not a complaint. I don't plow driveways or sharpen skates for a living and I didn't get a new sled for Christmas, so I'm not unhappy we came away from the winter months as lightly as we did.

What it meant at my house was that the squirrel feeding went on basically unabated. Years ago, our daughter, Michelle, discovered if you overcame your fear of the unknown long enough to allow the neighborhood squirrels to overcome their fear, you could hand-feed them until they ran out of enthusiasm or you had exhausted your supply.

I smile when I see the ones on my block climbing the overhead wires or making their ways out from under parked cars always heading in the same direction, towards my house on Lincoln Avenue when, for reasons they cannot fathom, at some point daily the back door will open and Michelle will have a container with perhaps as many as two dozen peanuts. And so it will begin.

We've been at this so long, to my mind, the squirrels seem to be a little larger than their brethren from Williams and Sachem Streets. That's what good living will do. Feeding was easier to justify during harsh winters past that, somehow, we were helping the squirrels and now we just feed them year-round. They've been at this along with us, and I suspect many of those stopping by are the children or grand-children of the original group, one of whom would walk up a trouser leg because it could smell a peanut in a front pocket.

The squirrels do not always get along-they tend to chase one another as the feeding gets started as if my daughter would run out of peanuts. Their behavior is comical but illogical. The first squirrel with a peanut has to quickly run or he will be chased by one or more of other squirrels who will pursue the first one running past other nuts our daughter has thrown to distract and reassure them. Ignoring the available (and plentiful) food, they continue to pursue that which they cannot have.

There are other times one with peanut in his mouth, will chase away other squirrels though there's no way he can bite them without sacrificing the nut he already has, something that will never happen. And yet everyday, the same tableaux play out in our backyard, until the last peanut has disappeared.

I think of us when I see them, when I'm being less than kind, because they oftentimes behave towards one another much as we do in terms of what we have, what we do with what we have and how we plan for our future. No fugues or fantasies, just no foresight beyond the end of a whiskered nose as we look no more than one footfall ahead of where we are.

We're not as gray as they are but our thinking is sometimes as fuzzy as they are furry. I worry about what they, and we, will do if habits need to change in order to continue to be successful. Plus, there's just so many recipes for peanuts I can come up with.
-bill kenny