Sciuridaceous* Appreciations

Here in the US, January 21, 2013, presents a veritable bounty of reasons to celebrate. It’s the (celebrated) birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; it’s the (celebrated) quadrennial ceremony of the inauguration of the President; and, Wikipedia tells me, it is also National Hug Day — when we are supposed to hug everyone we feel like hugging (and, presumably, everyone else can just go to hell… especially, presumably, if they try to hug us).

And (apparently since 2001, per the efforts of a wildlife professional named Christy McKeown) January 21 is also Squirrel Appreciation Day.

Here in our little well-treed suburban corner of north Florida, we live in a neighborhood pretty much owned and operated by squirrels. The Missus and I have come to identify particular favorites. Most recently, we focused on a little guy who had some horrible wound in his side — a long, apparently poorly-healing gash which didn’t seem to diminish his enthusiasm for life. The Pooch and I, for a time, often encountered a half-tailed squirrel; in my mind’s eye, I imagined that he’d lost the uttermost portion to a run-in with an automobile tire. (The squirrels here are madly jealous of cars’ monopoly of the streets and cul-de-sacs, and challenge it at every opportunity.) And every now and then, a new one seems to discover the joys of frequenting a house with large, stucco-exterior walls. They can spend hours walking around with their heads pointed straight up, down, or sideways, defying gravity, all Spiderman-like.

We also have our share of squirrel tragedies, of course. Some weeks, we seem to see more two-dimensional than -three-dimensional squirrels on the asphalt. And sitting out on our screened back deck, over which soar many tree limbs, we’ve seen what happens when one daredevil or another ever-so-slightly miscalculates a change in wind direction, a stirring of a branch, at just the wrong moment before leaping aboard the inter-tree mid-air express.

(A one-pound or less rodent may be a small animal. But when it drops to a wooden deck from thirty or forty feet up, I’ll tell ya: Wham! doesn’t do the sound justice. It always surprises us when they immediately jump to their feet, sort of shake their heads with little whubba-whubba-whubba cartoon movements, and scamper away.)

But Squirrel Appreciation Day is also, as it happens, a wonderful time to visit one of my favorite little back corners of the Intertubes, a treetop curated by the blogger (and long-time friend of RAMH) known as the Querulous Squirrel. Her current abode is only the most recent of several, but serves as an excellent place to get to know her if you don’t already. (Especially noteworthy, I think: she’s finally dropped her pseudonym, so we can find other places she frequents.)

The full title of her blog, at the moment, is Querulous Squirrel Daily Microfiction Quarterly. If you read all of that title and find yourself a little uncertain what to expect, consider some of the hints posted in the sidebar:

FICTIONEER’S LICENSE TO PRACTICE

All material covered under Massachusetts Poetic and Fictioneers’ License #007, a subsidiary of the Intergalactic Poetic and Fictioneers’ Union. May this license last for all of eternity, never to expire, like the New World of the Internet itself.

…

FICTION ONLY

These stories are all based on fictitious characters and situations and any resemblance to anyone’s life is purely coincidental. Facts can suddenly change with the stroke of a computer key. Do not believe anything you read here.

Without reading a single word of one of her posts, from the sidebar you can also learn that Squirrel is a Harvard-PhD psychotherapist (or perhaps it would help to think of her as a psychotherapist-in-transition, to the next phase of her calling). You can learn that she’s a committed left-winger, and unafraid to challenge those who merely pretend to that label. You can learn something of her, well, her idiosyncratic tastes (literature! the craft of writing! chickens, whales, and… Mothra?!?).

Some things which may not be obvious, however, until you start to prowl around the blog:

She writes — a lot — sometimes three posts published in a day (although, granted, they’re short, and she may have actually written them over longer periods of time).
She has had one hell of a year (and by that, I don’t mean she’ll look back on 2012 with great fondness).
What she has to say about children and families — her own and others, along the entire spectrum, from horror to wonder — may just break your heart (whether she’s saying it through fiction or not).
She has a sly wit, a fondness for goofy protagonists, and a penchant for writing (micro-)fictions whose last sentences you don’t want to ignore.
She seems to be made of a peculiar sort of steel: fearsomely strong, yet also capable of cracking, shattering, and somehow — magically, magnetically, or otherwise — pulling the shards back together again.

Google Reader offers great convenience to people who want to follow many blogs, but it also imposes a tyranny on those who drop their guard: overlook it too long, by choice or not, and you will quickly find yourself immobilized by guilt at favorites you’re still not visiting often enough. So you go ahead and take advantage of Reader’s own interface, which lets you (usually) read entire posts without ever leaving the Google site. Thus, not only do you not interact with those bloggers, they don’t even know you’ve visited: the tyranny of cruel laziness.

Thus, for me to say I’ve been faithfully reading Squirrel’s various bloggish manifestations for over four years feels like a cheat. Oh, I have been reading them, all right. But maybe there’s no better day to revive the habit of visiting than on Squirrel Appreciation Day.

Some recent favorites, for one reason or another:

Thanks so much for continuing to write, Squirrel!

_____________________

* Not sure about that adjective. Should be something like that, anyhow.

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