Some Thing

flat but round

There’s a family of squirrels that fly between the mulberry and the pines and the oak and cherry trees near the garden. They make barky chatters at each other then swirl in place and leap, in crazed attempts to catch one another. They never do. Or they never seem to do.

What they do best is shock the hell out of me when I’m working on veg or drawing or writing. The next best thing they do is surprise Tuck into submission.

Tuck is our one eyed rooster who lives alone in a very cushy spacious well outfitted chicken house. He has two roosts which he can’t fly to because he’s old and rickety. He has three walls of screened windows so he gets plenty of air. And he has a tin roof so he stays dry and maintains protected status in the thick of all that unrestrained squirrel parkour.

Tuck used to have several hennies. He killed a couple of them, then a couple more just died of old age. Now he’s alone and we feed him and all the wild birds - this is Dove’s Roost Farm, you know - and the big fat squirrels. So he waddles out of his house in the morning and gets fed yummy stuff in addition to his chicken food. Lasagne, greens and cheese, squash, and his favorite of all of the things - apples.

I don’t know how I got off on that tangent. Oh. Squirrels. It’s squirrel TeeVee for ol’ Tuck. And that’s pretty good and pretty safe. The way they leap from treetop to rooftop to down the poles of his garden and back up. It’s quite entertaining. He likes it, you can tell, because he watches with that watery golden eye of his all the squirrel gymnastics. Quietly. Expectantly.

You can tell that he likes the squirrels because he doesn’t complain a whit. I Mean. When a possum sneaks into his house, O bloody hell, what a racket! Not just a racket but he runs outside and makes an “I’m being murdered!” scream. He doesn’t like the possum. And when buzzards, hawks, and even crows fly over, he freezes in place hiding, usually in his doorway or in the stand of tall grass in his yard.

I know that if Tuck could laugh, he would laugh at the squirrels. They are so funny, after all. He’s a verbal boy, talking back and forth with Tom and me. But we can’t seem to capture his attention like the squirrels do. I guess that’s a good thing, because we aren’t in the garden close to his house near him all day long, and, well, the squirrels are.

All that to say, it’s Friday people. And if you can tell me what this drawing is you get a free paid subscription. Laaaaaaaaaa!