Sunday, January 24, 2010

Squirrel Next Door

It was early spring when I noticed one squirrel climbing along the side of the house next door. This one caught my attention because she had no tail, the whole tail had gone!
Her name is Molly. She lives next door. That,s right, she lives next door in the private house. She bores into the stucco wall. The stucco wall is the wall that looks like a solid cement wall, actually, it is a styrofoam construction with a very thin cement shell on the outside surface. That is a part that makes it look like a solid cement wall. Molly finds the crack of the cement shell at the corner on the second floor and starts boring in and digging the styrofoam out. She literally makes her house behind the cement shell.
It is hard to imagine how she lost her tail at the first place. If someone wanted her tail so badly, might have caught her and clipped her tail off? A dog might have chased and bitten her tail right off? She might have got caught while climbing or jumping around on the tree? Squirrel is agile with very high speed either on the ground or up on the tree. None of these could have happened. So she probably was born like that which is phenomenon. I would bet, in your life time, if you have ever seen a squirrel without tail? I have been around a lot and never seen one like this before.
Molly and I start seeing each other more often. Everyday before I go out to work and come home, I feed her with peanuts two times a day. So, she knows the time when she will get something to eat. At one point of time I switch from plain peanuts to the chocolate shell with peanuts inside. She loves that, later on I run out of the chocolate shell and I give her plain peanuts. she hardly touches it at the mean time looks up to see my face. You know what kind of question she would like to ask me. She is just like one of us.
Molly has been very busy running in and out of her house everyday. One day in late spring I come home after work. I always look up to her house to check on her. I see small faces, three of them peeking out to see the outside world. Molly raises up her family in there. No wander she has been busy lately. Now it turns out this single family home has two families living in it. The three small squirrels start to come out more often as the summer creeps in. So I have to supply more peanuts but the three small squirrels stay around for a while until they are strong enough to be on their own and then they start fading away. Now Molly's mission has been accomplished.

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