The Squirrel
John Luthens
The world had frozen into a winter of despair. Piles of snow, bitter cold outside, political chaos and pandemic icing up the media indoors. I was being buried in the motions of daily routine and losing hope in a storm of misery. Then it snowed again. No good left in the universe. I gave up and drifted into the artic wasteland that had become my home.
I stumbled through subdivisions on the shoulder of the street because the sidewalks were wintered shut. Cars rolled by, oblivious to my mood, kicking up waves of slush and ice. I received angry looks but was to beat down to care. I was trapped inside a broken snow globe and looking out at the world.
Businesses were shuttered. Whirlwinds of white blew off their roofs in gusts. The schoolyard was mounded with snow, but there weren’t any children around to dig tunnels or play king of the mountain on the piled banks. I peered through the brittle links surrounding the swimming pool and remembered times of splashing sunshine. The fence was covered in frosted ivy and the slide was frozen in time. The enamel on the diving board was peeling in the wind from a year of neglect, and the pool itself was full to the deep end in drifted snow.
The gauge of my disposition swung colder and wetter, like a battery losing its charge. Perhaps the snow globe was fine and I was the one who was broken. I’d lost hope entirely and was slumping home to hibernate in misery when I chanced upon the squirrel. Things began to change after that.
I only glimpsed his bushy tail at first. The squirrel was upended and burrowing down into a foot of snow beneath a tree. He looked like he was trying to claw himself away from the outside world. This was more like it... a sight that I could relate to. I plopped down on a snowbank and watched him sink into the white abyss.
The squirrel disappeared for an eternity. Judged against the scope of the universe it was not even the blink of an eye. When he reappeared, his fur was frosted with snow, but he’d come up bright-eyed and defiant with a blackened nut clasped in his mouth. And there, in the dead of town and in the bleakest of times, that squirrel began scolding me roundly.
“I just hit the jackpot! This nut may seem tiny against the rigors of life, but by the looks of it, it’s damn sight better than anything you’ve got. What are you doing moping in a snowbank when there are still wonderous treasures to be found? Start digging. I’m pretty sure that you’re sitting above a bonanza of acorns that I hid last fall!”
The dressing down went on and on. My grasp of squirrel language is rudimentary at best, but the fact that I understood anything at all meant that maybe, just maybe, my mental state was beginning to thaw. One small act in the drift of nature’s cold drama, but with a fiery message that could melt an iceberg. It was as simple and elegant as an acorn. Moreover, the squirrel’s lecture was laid out in terms that were plain enough to resurrect a stranded soul.
I left him chattering away like a prophet. I was crusted in ice and it was still snowing. Businesses in town were still closed, the temperature was dropping, and there didn’t seem to be any end in sight. Apparently, my squirrel hadn’t been clever enough to change the climate, and his hidden nut hadn’t been big enough to fix the world’s problems either. I flipped on the news when I got home and discovered that it hadn’t changed any while I was away.
Funny thing was, it no longer bothered me.
John Luthens is a freelance writer and photographer from Grafton, Wisconsin. His first novel, Taconite Creek, along with a nonfiction collection of his stories, Writing Wild: The Tales and Trails of a Wisconsin Outdoor Journalist, are available from Cable Publishing at www.cablepublishing.com