Squirrels

Squirrels are so brainlessly agile.  On my walk this morning (stolen,  too short), one of them leapt three feet sideways from a low branch to a garden stake, weightless as an astronaut, seemingly released from obligations to pesky things like gravity and physics.

It was, in the manner of squirrels, after a bird feeder.

For several years during my middle childhood, my father waged drawn-out, futile war over the bird feeder he'd erected in our back yard.  He'd wanted songbirds.  Instead he got fat, upside-down squirrels, clinging by their toes to crosspieces, vampiric, noses deep in the seed.

He tried rearrangement.  He tried noise deterrence.  He ran at them personally, gibbering and pulling faces like a deranged clown.  He gambled on the application to the feeder of a sticky goop that, while purported to drive off squirrels, merely made the rodents' movements more precise, their journey to the bird feeder that much more balletic.

The last thing he tried was acceptance.  We fed the squirrels, and they were beautiful.