Squirrels Know Where Home Is

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There is a ladder against my neighbor’s house.  It’s a tall extension ladder that has been leaning there for a couple of months.

Frequently this winter, I have stood at my back door with a cup of coffee in hand and wondered about the ladder.  My neighbor is close to three-quarters of a century old.  I’m not sure he should be climbing up onto his roof.

As I finished a walk the other day, I noticed my friend was outside doing some work (on the ground), so I stopped to ask him about the ladder.  His reply surprised me.

“Oh, those pesky squirrels!”

I wondered for a moment if the squirrels had gotten a team together to move the ladder themselves.  You know, to make it easier to get up into the pine trees nearby.  Can’t you see them standing on each other’s shoulders, the top of that tall ladder wobbling around as they stagger to and fro toward the overhanging roof?

It’s not as if there aren’t enough of them around to accomplish the task.  At any given time, I can walk outside and frighten half a dozen of them.  Often, I can see more than double that number cavorting and chasing each other as I gaze out the living room window.

But, no.  My neighbor told me he’s had to set a trap inside the eave of his attic—one he can’t reach from inside the house.  Thus, the ladder.  He’s already trapped six or seven of the cute little varmints and says they’re not all gone yet.

I nodded sagely, remembering the old Victorian house in which we raised our children, years ago.  The attic of that house was home to a plethora of the bushy-tailed rodents.

I remember a visit to our family doctor during those years.  We made a last-minute run out to the country to release a squirrel we had trapped in the attic, so I was a little late for my appointment.  When I explained what happened to the kind old medic, he laughed.

“That squirrel will get back home before you do!”

I didn’t believe him then, but after doing a little research, I’ve found that the little critters do have a strong homing instinct, returning home sometimes from as far away as fifteen miles.

Most squirrels never go more than a few hundred yards away from their home in an entire lifetime, we’re told by some experts.  And yet, in dire necessity, they can find their way home from up to fifteen miles away!

The squirrels know where home is.

On a recent visit to a big city in a neighboring state, we turned into the parking lot of a church where we were to meet up with some family members and saw a car stop near the entrance to the parking lot.

The church was surrounded by trees—maples, oaks, and sweet gums—making a verdant wall of protection around the campus.  There, at the entry from the city highway, the paved drive in front of him, the man opened the hatchback of his SUV.  Taking out a live trap, he set it on the ground and opened the spring-loaded door.  Immediately, a terrified squirrel darted out, making a beeline for the trees nearby.

As the man placed the trap back into his car and drove away, I thought of our old doctor and couldn’t stop the words: 

“That squirrel will get back home before he does!”

We laughed, but there’s a niggling truth that my brain keeps worrying at.

The squirrel’s world has been turned upside down—nothing around him is familiar or recognizable.  And yet, he knows how to find his home again.

And, he’ll be back as soon as he can get there.

It seems to me that the world around us is all topsy-turvy right now.  Nothing is as it was—when we were growing up—when we were settling down with the one we love—when we were making plans for the still far-distant future.

And yet, we who trust in the Living God have always had a home.  Wherever we have been—no matter how far away from the familiar, the comfortable—we’ve been promised a hiding place.

“For you are my hiding place;
    you protect me from trouble.
    You surround me with songs of victory.”
(Psalm 32:7, NLT)

Our home is where He is.  And, where He is, we are safe.

I’ve watched the squirrels scatter for their hiding places.  They head for the distant oak tree, with its nest of leaves and sticks high up in the branches, and they are safe.  I suppose they may head for my neighbor’s attic, too.

Our home is much closer.  You see, He lives in us.

In us.

It’s safer, too.

Maybe it’s time to head there now.

Dr. Moose was wrong. 

I think we can get home before that squirrel does.

 

“The name of the Lord is a strong tower;
The righteous runs into it and is safe.”
(Proverbs 18:10, NASB)

“In the gentle evening breeze
By the whispering shady trees
I will find my sanctuary in the Lord.”
(from Full Force Gale by Van Morrison)

 

© Paul Phillips. He’s Taken Leave. 2024. All Rights Reserved.

Learning From the Nuts (I Wonder if I Need New Teachers?)

image by Alexa on Pixabay

Life lessons come from the strangest of places.  Things I think I should have learned from study and discussion must be discerned from the animals on the porch.  And, their diets.

But, here I go again, cart before horse, expecting the reader to know what I’m talking about.  Let me start again.

On a recent morning, I sat in my easy chair with a cup of coffee.  As I often do, I stared (most likely, a blank stare; mornings are like that), looking at nothing and everything outside my window.

With a start, I became aware that a large rodent had jumped onto the ramp leading to my front door.  A handsome little beast, she sat and flipped her tail a few times, as if to warn interlopers away.  She was carrying something in her teeth.  A big something.

Well, big for a squirrel.  Protruding from her mouth were four pecans, all attached to each other, still encased in their protective covering.  As I watched, the beautiful creature turned the cluster in her mouth, crunching down on the hull of a single nut and detaching the pecan inside, said pecan looking much like the ones we purchase in their shell at the grocery store.  She then jumped onto the ground under the ramp, rapidly digging a hole with her little hand-shaped paws and dropping the pecan into it.

Food for the future.  Their Creator made the little rodents intelligent enough to plan for the cold of winter when no fruit or nuts will be found except by foraging on the ground.  And that’s a hard row to hoe, as the red-headed lady who raised me would have said.

Well, that’s not so unusual, one might think.

And, one would be right.  Not unusual at all.  Until they consider that there is no pecan tree in my yard.

The Lovely Lady and I went on an exploratory trek last week.  I had seen evidence of the pecans in the yard and wondered where they were coming from.  As we walked, we found a large pecan tree at the edge of a clearing about two blocks away from our home.  Exploring further, we located another large one in the vacant lot behind our house, probably 200 feet from where my new friend was burying hers in hopes of a meal, come winter.

Her actions aren’t all that odd.  Except, many experts say that gray squirrels usually don’t travel more than that distance away from their home in any one day to find food.  They can travel several miles but don’t under normal circumstances.  As evidenced by the many pecan hulls scattered around my yard, this one is making the trip multiple times a day right now.

Adding to my confusion, many of the pecan hulls I’ve found are at the base of a beautiful, healthy black walnut tree right outside my back door.  Squirrels love black walnuts!  And, the tree is covered—absolutely covered—in nuts this fall!

Besides that, only ten or fifteen feet away from the black walnut tree is a chestnut tree.  I’ll admit, I don’t understand how the squirrels can stand to chew through the spiny hull of the chestnut, but always in recent years, I’ve found myriad pieces of the outer coverings from the prickly nuts in my yard.

And, while the little gray creature sat on her haunches and chewed through the hulls, I chewed mentally on the question that formed in my mind.

She has walnuts and chestnuts, along with acorns from the pin oak in the front yard, aplenty.  Why would she brave the space between my yard and the big pecan tree?  Every step away from her home is fraught with fear and very real dangers.

It didn’t take long.  As Mr. Tolkien would say, even I can see through a brick wall in time.

The light above my head flickered to life.

She likes pecans better than any of the other, more easily acquired, options!  She loves them enough that she’ll bypass the easy pickings of the huge oak, to say nothing of the black walnuts that have already fallen, with many more awaiting the next strong wind to liberate them from the limbs high above the ground where they hang expectantly.

She will travel the equivalent of miles for a human to reach the food she loves.

It’s easy to see where this is heading, isn’t it?

A friend told us the other day he had it on good authority that there are 68 places along the highway going through our little town where we humans may stop and get a meal.  Sixty-eight!  I’m not sure I can come up with that many.  But, I know it is a sizable number.

Still, every day, hundreds of residents from this town head for other municipalities, sometimes as far as eighty miles away, to do nothing more than eat food.

We want what we want.  And, we’ll subject ourselves to danger, expense, and inconvenience to get it when we want it.

I do it too, occasionally.

I almost hesitate to keep going down this road I’ve begun to traverse.  Someone will say I’ve begun to meddle.  Perhaps I have.

Why, when we’re so finicky about the food we put in our mouths and bellies, are we so lax about the garbage we put into our minds and hearts?

Daily, we sit and peruse social sites, news outlets, and entertainment sources, allowing the gossip, the lies, and the filth to permeate our very souls.  Easy pickings, the red-headed lady who…well, you get the idea. 

No effort required.  Right there at our fingertips.  A touch on the screen and we devour whatever comes to our eyes.  And ears.

We—the very same connoisseurs—who eschew the everyday fare in our local cafes and restaurants, will shovel in this garbage in ever-increasing quantities.  Without more than a perfunctory thought to truth and morality—and yes—to purity, we swallow what the world around us offers.

Yes.  I know.  Meddling. 

I’m climbing down off of the soapbox now.  Carefully, so I don’t break anything.

I have just this one parting thought. 

My admiration of the beautiful squirrel aside, it’s time to begin choosing carefully. 

There are better things.

Better.

Jeremiah could tell you.  No, not the bullfrog.  The prophet who cried also knew what was good for him.

And, for us.

When I discovered your words, I devoured them.
They are my joy and my heart’s delight,
for I bear your name,
O Lord God of Heaven’s Armies.
(Jeremiah 15:16, NLT)

Time for a change in diet.

I bet it’ll be worth the journey.

Oh!  I’m with the squirrel, too.  Pecans are better than black walnuts.  Any day.

 

Thy word have I hid in my heart
        That I might not sin against Thee.
(Psalm 119:11, KJV)

You can tell a lot about a fellow’s character by his way of eating jellybeans.
(Ronald Reagan)

© Paul Phillips. He’s Taken Leave. 2023. All Rights Reserved.

Restless Heart

It wasn’t what woke me, but my guilty conscience certainly was what kept me awake until the first rays of the sun broke over the horizon on that recent morning.

What woke me was the dogs barking in the backyard.  It’s not all that unusual.  They are dogs, after all.  Normally, it’s just a squirrel in the sweet gum tree, right above their heads.

squirrel-832893_1280Squirrels are such undisciplined creatures.  They run up and down the trees, simply to tempt fate it seems .  Then, when they have the treasure they sought, a nut or the stalk of some plant, they carry it in a rush up the trunk of the tree.  Right in front of the snapping jaws of death they scurry, chattering as they go.  

The dogs, creatures of habit, want nothing more than to have order in their world.  No animal is safe within their reach, simply because that is one of their rules.  Nothing walks where they walk.  There is a penalty for doing so.

The penalty is death.  They have meted out the penalty numerous times.  Moles, birds, o’possums, even a squirrel or two have met the end of their undisciplined ways at the jaws of the law-keepers.

Hmmm.  Like the squirrels, I seem to have wandered a bit.  I meant to tell you that the dogs were not barking at a squirrel on that early morning, but had bigger law-breakers to attend to.

The neighbors up the street a block or so were the reason for the ruckus.  He, sitting in his roughly-idling truck, and she, standing in her bathrobe outside the front door, were shouting at each other.  Again.  

I stood at the kitchen window and remembered that time, a few months ago, when the police were at that front door because of a complaint.  And still, at all hours of the night or day—mostly night—the noisy disturbances are likely to erupt.

On this particular morning, I, standing at the kitchen window, listened for a few moments, fuming.  The nerve!  Don’t they know people—No, strike that!—law-abiding people are trying to sleep?  

I was angry.  Then, I realized I was proud.  Yes, proud.

I would never do that.  Never.  I know better than to shout at the Lovely Lady.  I certainly wouldn’t do it in public.  And, you can bet it wouldn’t be at four-thirty in the morning!

Mentally, I went down the list of things they do I would never do.  It was significant.  I was proud.

As the truck finally backed out of the driveway and roared up the road, laying rubber for a fair distance, I spun on my bare heel and headed back upstairs—to sleep, I supposed.

Not that morning.  Sleep had fled.

I lay there beside the slumbering Lovely Lady and I crumbled.

Pharisee!  Hypocrite!  

In the dark right before dawn, the words were whispered into the blackness, but they sounded as if someone had shouted them throughout the entire house.  I looked at the face of the sleeping woman beside me, but if she heard, she didn’t let on.

Do you know what I learned, in the darkness of my thoughts that early morning?

 Nothing new.  

That’s right.  Nothing I hadn’t already known.

I heard the Teacher say, “The second is like unto the first.  Love your neighbor as you do yourself.” (Matthew 22:39)  I’ve heard the words a thousand times, or more.

I’ve used them in my writing so many times, I can’t remember all of them.

Here’s the other thing I didn’t learn that I already knew, that morning: If you’re a dog, you think you’re better than the squirrels. 

Perhaps, I should rephrase that.  When you work hard to follow the rules, you begin to look down on those who don’t.

It’s really hard to remember that you love someone when your mouth is full of the words I told you so.

It’s hard to pray—really pray—for a person if you think you’re superior to them.

Do you realize how difficult it is to lie still and be quiet in a bed when the disaster that is your soul is revealed to you?  If the pre-dawn night was dark, how was it that I saw the filth of my heart so clearly?

The evil servant who forgot how great was the debt that had been forgiven him, grabbing the man who owed him a mere pittance by the throat while demanding payment couldn’t have known more torment.  (Matthew 18:21-35)

Ah, but even as I made my promise to be a different person, I remembered.  

I recalled that it would never come—could never come—from me.  If I try to be good—if I try to do right—I run right back to the trash I vowed to never dig up again.

It is all because of grace.  All of it that matters.

I can’t do this.  No one can.

And, that’s the whole point.  If I can claim to be good, I have a right to look down on others who walk this path with me.

I’m not good.

Grace changes that.  For any who come.

Funny.  When I remembered what I am—what I am and who He is—I thought about my neighbors again.  The anger was gone.  Almost instinctively, I found myself praying for them and thinking of ways to show them the love of Jesus.  

They are my neighbors, after all.

And finally, sleep came.  

It’s true:  The heart is restless until it rests in Him.

It’s time for rest.

 

 

I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me.
(Dietrich Bonhoeffer ~ German theologian ~ 1906-1945)

 

You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love.  For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.
(Galatians 5:13-15 ~ NIV)

 

 

 

© Paul Phillips. He’s Taken Leave. 2016. All Rights Reserved.