Growing up, it was always comforting to know that the sounds in my bedroom walls were not the boogeyman or someone trying to cut the phone lines before slaughtering my family and stealing Mom’s jewelry box. In fact, it was fun listening to the noise of the squirrels, which had managed to enter my house through several holes in the roofing, as I lay in bed at night.
I became accustomed to their pitter-patter and the frequent fights in which they would not only scuffle their feet and tumble down through unknown channels in my walls, but actually let out screams in the process. When I had girlfriends spend the night, I always took pride in warning them about the squirrels in the walls and attic.
My relationship with the squirrels changed one warm summer afternoon when I was 14. I had just finished jogging around the neighborhood during the hottest hours of the day in order to suffer through the suffocating humidity and feel athletic and accomplished. I hopped into the shower and as I tilted my head back to wash my hair, I cringed as the light fixture on the shower ceiling fell in, nearly flattening my face.
Before I could ponder the dangers of having electrical wiring dangling in my shower as the water was running, I felt a brush of fur on my ankle, looked down and screamed bloody murder when I saw a baby squirrel running in circles around my feet.
My dad, who must have thought the worst after hearing my scream, headed up stairs and saw me trembling in my towel with my back to the shower door. I explained the situation to him through my tears. He left, and showed up five minutes later with a shoebox and a plan, as dads do. I watched over his shoulder and sang his praises as he wrangled the poor, wet, shrieking squirrel into the shoebox.
Whereas my two younger brothers have always thought it fun to put on unnecessarily big goggles and chase squirrels down with their b.b. guns, I was relieved to know that this squirrel would be safely set free, back into the wild (although he’d probably end up back in my attic with the rest of his family). As I held one side of the shoebox and my father held the other, we shuffled the squirrel onto the roof outside of my bathroom window and watched as it leapt from the gutter to the roof above my parents room, up to the next level of house and onward toward freedom.
Maybe you remember the scene in Meet Joe Black when Brad Pitt and Claire Forlani are walking separate ways and the audience is sure, as they keep turning back to check each other out, that a glorious love affair will blossom from their chat over coffee. Brad’s eventual slaughter by oncoming traffic is not unlike the fate of the soft baby squirrel who, like Brad, unfortunately chose not to look where he was going and landed in the mouth of my beefy West Highland White Terrier. A breed originally used in England to eradicate their rat problem, my dog knew all too well how to lodge the small animal in her jaw and shake her head violently back and forth to break its neck.
My dad was able to look at the situation optimistically-one less squirrel trap. I, on the other hand, began crying as I saw the squirrel’s blood pooling around my dog’s two front feet.
