My Back Yard

“You look better with a tan” is one of the few lessons my father taught that has stuck with me.

I wasn’t keen on tanning. I preferred to be indoors. At home, my mother was usually the “bad guy” kicking me outside. The only time my father saw me during daylight was our yearly one-month visit to Maine. There, he took over as the sun’s cheerleader, forcing me out onto the sandy beach — no cover under beach umbrella allowed. He took his own medicine, browning darker than me, my mother or my brother. Much as I disliked him, I fell the closest to him in tanning ability.

My father also led the charge on my teenage acne, sending me to a dermatologist for dosing with drugs. The doctor also recommended regular tanning under a sun lamp.

My father loved the sun lamp recommendation. He ponied up whatever it cost. My mom plugged it into a socket in her home office, where I’d lie down on a red leather coach for the mandatory minutes. If only I could have read during that time, I’d have been fine. But no, I had to don protective goggles instead of glasses. No reading allowed, even if I could have held the book in a way that wouldn’t have blocked the lamp’s rays.

It seems ironic that my father, who happened to be a doctor, pushed me into sun exposure that we now know isn’t good for skin.

It’s also strange that, although I don’t like the outdoors any more than I did as a kid, I still think I look better with a tan. But I apply suntan lotion labeled 45 anyhow.

You can read other writers’ Sunday Scribblings on skin.

If you aspire to feeding squirrels by hand, as I described below, you should move your nut-holding hand as close to the ground as possible.

Squirrels don’t care to rear up to grab their nuts with a human looming over them. They prefer to turn tail and skedaddle.

Another hint to the wise: Hold the very end of the peanut with the tips of your fingers. Don’t lay your finger alongside the nut. Squirrel eyes are positioned on the sides for peripheral vision. They can’t see well directly in front of them. So a squirrel could easily mistake your finger for a peanut.

Basically, you’d be very foolish to try to hand-feed a squirrel. Don’t do it.

I’ve read that you can train chickadees to hand-feed. Sounds like a much safer activity.

That was the headline of a flyer tacked on my neighborhood’s telephone poles.

It ran over a color picture of a stern-looking gray and black tiger cat. Just like my childhood cat named Tiger.

The flyer made me feel sad. I would have missed Tiger a lot if he’d disappeared while I lived at home. As it was, I burst into tears when I learned of his death as a 20-something graduate student.

Tiger provided an oasis of predictability in my parent’s house. If I fed him and scratched his ears, he liked me. If I teased him, he’d bat a paw at me. I loved that.

YouTube has an entire category devoted to squirrels!

I like the one of baby squirrels eating grapes. There’s one little troublemaker in that cage.

I found these videos from a link on the Squirrel Board.

Sunday Scribblings’ theme is “instructions.”

Along with a key to my parents’ townhouse, my father gave me instructions for using it in the most important emergency.

Upon learning that my parents had died, I should get in my car, drive to the townhouse and carry out as many expensive antiques or pieces of art as possible. They had some nice pieces: a marble-topped bombe’ chest with gold curlicues, a Chinese handkerchief table, a pink quartz Mandarin duck lamp. Dad was worried that the IRS would appraise his valuables for a lot of money, forcing my brother and me to pay estate taxes. It would be better if the IRS didn’t learn about them.

“I’m not going to do that,” I said, reckoning that estate taxes would be the least of my problems if my parents died.

My parents still owned that house when my mother died. By the time my father’s turn came, he’d moved to Florida and we no longer spoke.

For Poetry Thursday, I’m re-posting an old poem.

Wearing a Teen Model’s Dress

That white dress on the cover of Seventeen.
It smelled of cool girl
when peasant clothes were chic.
Black ribbon decorated with leaves and red flowers
yoked the chest and
braceleted the wrists with Cossack flair.

I could conquer the world –
a teenage boy’s heart –
in a dress from Seventeen.
Or so I thought.

I nagged Mom to buy it.
She finally shlepped me to Macy’s.
The dress called to me
from its metal pipe rack.
I ran my hand over the ribbon,
savoring the silky embroidery threads
and the virgin white cotton fabric.

No, not that one, said Mom.
White isn’t practical.
We’ll take the red.
It’s the same as the dress on the magazine,
Only the color diverges.

Maybe that’s why,
when I rose from my seat
at the dance to greet the boy,
he snickered and said
“No, not you.”

I’m a squirrelholic.

On days that I spend at home, I run outside several times a day to refresh my neighborhood squirrels’ supply of treats. That means installing a dried ear of corn in the squirrel cafe, slathering peanut butter on the naked cobs dangling from our squngee, and tossing peanuts to eager little mouths.

It has been months since I fed any squirrels by hand.

Today I sat down on the lowest step of my back porch, peanuts in hand. Squirrels clambered out of the hedge and approached slowly. I took a chance. I held the tip of a peanut between two fingers. The squirrel neared. Just when I thought it would flee, it fastened its mouth around the nut, then ran for the bushes.

A minute later, another squirrel did the same.

Two in one day! Squirrellies, you’ve made me very happy.

While those two squirrels were burying their stash, I emptied my jeans pocket of nuts. I scattered them across the patio. No need to make the little rascals beg for their refills.

Iggy and I celebrated twenty years of married bliss tonight with a yummy dinner at Oleana.

Best dinner item was roasted squid with prosciutto, cherries and parsley. Sublime.

“The bees are so intent on harvesting nectar that I can pat them as they work. I can ruffle the yellow fur on a bumble’s thorax. I can stroke the black corduroy of her abdomen.”

Can you imagine stroking a bee? That passage grabbed me.

I’m reading this book because the squirrel on its front cover caught Iggy’s eye as he browsed in a bookstore.

Luckily for my fantasy of publishing a squirrel book, squirrels are not the focus of her book. She does feed and discuss them, including a useful reference to my bible of squirrel behavior, North American Tree Squirrels. The concordance to Suburban Safari shows that squirrels are a significant focus of the book. However, by page 95, she has not made friends with the squirrels. In fact, they greet her approach by bolting for the trees. Hah-hah, I laughed to myself.

Hannah does, however, make friends with a chipmunk whom she nicknames Cheeky. Cheeky comes into her house to get sunflower seeds from her. That part of the relationship is nice. Holmes doesn’t seem to mind the dime-sized watery spots or dry pellets that Cheeky leaves as souvenirs.

This week’s Sunday Scribblings assignment is to write about a topic you research. My Google search topic? “Paris top tourist sights.”

The first Google result linked to a book on Amazon. Not very helpful.

The next result was Cycling in Paris. That’s not very representative of Paris, but it suits my interests. Iggy and I try to bike wherever we go.

I moved on and found
Paris Top 10 Attractions
The must see sights of Paris
1. Eiffel Tower
2. Louvre
3. Arc de Triomphe
4. Notre Dame Cathedral
5. Avenue Champs-Elysees
6. Latin Quarter
7. Concorde Place
8. Rodin Museum
9. D’Orsay Museum
10. St.Chapelle & Conciergerie

I realized I saw nine out of 10 of these sights when I visited Paris in high school with my parents. I don’t know if the D’Orsay Museum existed back then.

Concierge.com’s list of things to do and see in Paris came next. I’ll have to print out this article because it listed less mainstream places to visit as well as some interesting classes to take.