A Pillow Book from the Land of Artichokes

Sunday, September 26, 2004

CONVERSATION WITH SQUIRREL

After running some errands I parked my car in back and came around to my front porch to find an extremely large squirrel ensconced in one of my rose pots, furiously digging away--great wads of peat moss flying through the air to land in brown clumps alongside the terracotta pot. Even though I'm standing about one foot away from him, he nonchalantly keeps digging away.

"Excuse me," I say to him. "What, exactly, do you think you're doing?"

He looks up at me for a moment, and then resumes his frantic digging.

"No, really," I say. "I mean it. What do you think you're doing?"

He pauses and sits back to regard me for a moment. We face off. He acts as if he hasn't been doing anything at all. I notice that there are crumbs of soil in his whiskers. I tell him so. He seems terribly unimpressed, as if to suggest that I'm not going to make the CSI team at any time in the very near future. He gets ready to start digging again. There's a squirrel-sized hollow in the pot ominously close to the roots of my rose bush.

"Hey!" I tell him. "I don't think so! Am-scray, you little ugger-bay!" (For some reason, I feel compelled to speak Pig Latin to the squirrel, thinking that perhaps squirrels respond better to Pig Latin? Really, though, I have no idea why.)

The squirrel reluctantly abdicates his position from the flower pot and takes his time crossing the porch toward his tree.

I threaten to confiscate all his nuts. I realize later how that might sound to any eavesdropping neighbors. I tell him that his less-than-stellar attitude has been duly noted.

The squirrel, hand to God, swirls his tail at me in what can only be interpreted as the Rodential Equivalent of exaggerated eye rolling.

Don't think that I don 't have my eye on him.

Posted by Artichoke Heart | 2:40 PM |