Mind the Gap I

There’s a squirrel that lives in the trees outside of our house. These trees are all deciduous but there are some evergreen ones that keep their leaves all winter. I can sit in my usual spot on the couch and look out the window and, in the winter, the view is both leafy and limby. When we moved in, the owners of the place cleared an opening in this patch of trees because they thought we might want to garden back there. As usual, the effort wasn’t well planned. It turns out it’s a dark swamp back there. Clearing the trees also had the added benefit of affording us a great view of their enormous collection of tires (we live on a farm and, as we all know, farmers save tires). To their credit, I think they did try to maintain the trees around the edge of the clearing but the backhoe needed a way to get in and out. So now’s there’s a gap. Where the trees were once continuous, there is now a space between them. This is nice in some ways because it probably lets in more light than we would otherwise get back here in our little hollow. Without the gap I wouldn’t be able to see the sky from the couch (which is important on those non-ambulatory days). We look west through the gap and last night we watched the most amazing, purple and orange, post-apocalyptic sunset ever...over the pile of tires.

So, this squirrel. He lives in the trees around the clearing and, in making his way from one end of the trees to the other, he has to pass the gap and, in the winter, I can see his passing of the gap really well. My eyes are drawn outside when I catch a glimpse of him popping out of the dense foliage onto the bare branches. He's a little grey squirrel with a long, bushy tail. He quickly skitters out to the end of a limb and flings himself across the gap. All without hesitation. He falls a little in elevation but the tips of the other branches are within his reach so he grabs one of them, hangs upside down for a moment (he always winds up upside down), waits for the bouncing to slow, then pulls himself up onto the branch and skitters off into the leaves on the other side of the gap.

I see this at least once per day and it makes me very happy. Even though he never misses, my heart skips a beat when he flings himself off that branch. Just enough fear that my heart feels lighter when he’s snatched the branch on the other side and made his way to safety. And I smile when he’s bouncing up and down on the tip of the limb because he looks like a monkey. We have squirrels where I come from, but I never get to look out of my window and see this. Never. So I’ll miss this when we leave.