My Back Yard

The energy crisis has hit my backyard.

On Saturday Iggy went to Agway to buy more ears of dried corn. He got their last bag. There’s a corn shortage, said the clerk.

I’ve read about corn being diverted to ethanol. Now it strikes home.

If worst comes to worst, Iggy will order corn over the Internet. We must feed our squirrels. 

Ready Freddy is one of my squirrel friends. I can count on her to come running for peanuts if she’s around when I step out my back door.

I call her Ready because she’s always ready for nuts. She also has front paws with reddish brown patches. Freddy is short for Frederica because all of my squirrel friends are girls. At least that’s what I’ve arbitrarily decided.

Freddy occupies a wide body. I guess that’s what comes of socking back treats so regularly. 

A lush tail drapes over the branch. I think it’s a squirrel.

The tail is dark. Could it be a black squirrel?

That’s a very big leg. Perhaps it’s a cat. But I’ve never seen any of the neighborhood cats up a tree. Not even the tabby who considers my yard an extension of his own. 

But the head is wide. It’s a raccoon. A small one. Must be a baby that ventured out on its own as dusk fell around 7:30 p.m. 

My back yard erupted while Iggy and I spent 4 nights in New York City.

A few daffodils bloomed. Silver lamium, bleeding hearts, peony, and dill pushed through a cover of mulch. One flower that looks that a miniature hyacinth stands alone in the front yard. Some rose bush leaves have unfurled.

While the bleeding hearts that I can see from my back door are still tight, those that abut my back sidewalk have already opened. They must experience a different microclimate.

Madam Toastmaster, fellow Toastmasters and honored guests. I have a story about a personal obsession that I’d like to share with you.

But first, I need to know, can you keep a secret? …. Good.

I have a secret identity. You know me as My Backyard, a mild-mannered writer. Perhaps you see me as a Clark Kent type of figure. But when I step into my backyard, I take on a different identity. I become Squirrel Lady, friend to wild squirrels. This evening I’d like to talk to you about how my husband and I started feeding the squirrels.

For most of my adult life, I didn’t really see squirrels. Sure they passed in front of my eyes, but I paid no more attention to them than to the ants that climbed out of sand hills in the cracks between the lines in the sidewalk.

My lack of interest in squirrels began to change after a fateful conversation with my husband. One day I asked him to buy me a packet of sunflower seeds at Home Depot. I wanted to experiment with planting sunflower seeds.

I expected he’d come back with a slim envelope about this size. Instead he came home with a huge 25-lb. bag. “What were you thinking?” I asked. Do you expect me to plant all of these seeds in the backyard? Our backyard isn’t large enough for me to plant more than a handful of seeds.” I was probably shrieking as I said these words.

Before Iggy could return the seeds to Home Depot, he lost the receipt. We were stuck with 25 pounds of seeds.

What could we do with them? Igme decided to dump them on the ground at the far end of our yard, so the birds could eat them, as pictured on the seed bag.

The seeds sat there for awhile. No birds came, but squirrels came. They came and they ate and they ate and they ate.

I watched them occasionally. You know what? They were pretty darned cute the way they stood on the ground, their paws holding the seeds daintily. Did you realize that squirrels don’t eat an entire sunflower seed? They crack the hull and then extract the nourishment inside. They don’t waste their energy on eating the hull. They just spit it out. Yecch!

I thought the squirrels were cute, but my husband Iggy seemed to fall in love with them. He is a softy for animals. Before long he built a Squirrel Palace to protect their seeds from rain and snow. What in the world does a Squirrel Palace look like? It’s a two-story structure built around a child-sized table, with walls and a roof to protect the seed tray that rests atop the child’s table. Naturally the walls are made of spanking new Plexiglas purchased for full price at Home Depot. It’s clear Plexiglas so the squirrels can see out as they eat. You wouldn’t want them to get claustrophobia, would you?

Before long, Iggy got into a routine of re-stocking the Palace every weekend. But he has also kept his eyes open for more ways to service our squirrels. Before long, he bought a Squngee. Squngee is the name of what’s essentially a bungee for squirrels. It hangs from a shepherd’s hook. At the bottom of the bungee there’s a long screw. It’s perfect for impaling… misbehaving husbands. No, I was just kidding. You take the screw and twist it into an ear of corn. An ear of corn is as beguiling to a squirrel as a juicy sirloin to a hungry meat-eater.

A squirrel will do just about whatever it takes to reach a delectable ear of corn dangling in the air from a bungee suspended from a shepherd’s hook. That could mean jumping up from the ground toward the corn. Or scrambling partway up the shepherd’s hook and reaching for the corn. Or sitting atop of the hook and pulling up the bungee cord like a fisherman using hand-over-hand technique.

This is entertaining. Seeing how hard the squirrels worked softened my heart toward them. Now I’m just as enthusiastic as my husband about feeding the squirrels.

Wind roared in my ears like waves crashing on a rocky shore. I wished I had a headband to pull over my ears as I biked along the Nashua River Rail Trail.

We covered about 25 miles today. 

Two-and-a-half minutes.

That’s how long it took the squirrel in the cafe to realize that there was an almond sitting under the far side of the table. Where was the incredible sense of smell that allows squirrels to sense nuts or other food buried six inches under ground?

The squirrel sat on a squirrel-sized chair in front of a squirrel-sized table gnawing on a corn cob impaled on a screw coming out of the table. She had to lean to the far side of the table to finish off the peanut butter. At that point she was within inches of the nut.

So, why did it take her so long to discover and abscond with the nut? Could it be that she prefers peanut butter to hard-shelled nuts? 

If you’re interested in getting your book published, you may enjoy reading "How Publishers Decide to Publish a Book (or Not)." It’ll give you an overview of the process.

I recently gave a friend her first taste of matzoh. "It tastes like saltines without the salt."

Today I made matzoh brei, which is essentially scrambled eggs incorporating matzoh softened in water, for Iggy and his brother, Eggy. It’s one of the treats of Passover. 

Pale pink lace dress

covered your

cancer-ridden body,

but it couldn’t blot out

your worries at my wedding.

Chemotherapy wracked

your body,

leaving you too tired

to cook or clean,

two staples of your life.

You were always a looker,

with a tall, slender model’s body.

So hard for you when

drugs bloated your body,

but they also erased your wrinkles.

You took pleasure where you could.