Origin Story

I been squirrelin’ roun’ these parts for a long time. Well, to clarify, i am a squirrel and i’ve been here since i was born, and before that, my family we been here for a hundred years or more. Before that we emigrated here from somewhere up north. Some squirrels and gophers come around, as the story goes, and said there’s a big town a growing up south of here. and its warmer and there’s all kind of amenities that we don’t have up here in
the forest. There’s garages and porches and telephone wires and cool stuff to do that we just don’t have up here. And we’re organizing a party to come travel south with us and get in on that good life livin’ in the city. Yes, there’s people there, but they don’t shoot at you like they do up here. And they leave all kind of food laying around and they grow stuff in their yards that you can just go and help yourself to.

So legend has it, there was a few that said thanks but no thanks, we are astayin’ where we are, but my great gran pappy and them they was like what do you all think? And they
held a council and it was decided that they would join the migration, and thats how we ended up down here. It was better back then of course. We was all one big family and well the winters were a lot longer and colder than they are now, but otherwise everybody got along and things were simpler. Nowadays, nobody has any respect anymore and its just so overgrown. A few of my cousins got run over with all these cars everywhere and the other squirrels and animals that moved in recently, heck they don’t know how things are done. They speak funny and don’t want to adapt to our ways.
They’re messin’ it up for everybody. And the dogs, you never seen so many dogs they’ll chase you right up a tree. So I don’t know. Things have changed a lot and hopefully somebody will come along and make it great again. And the people well a lot of them got real uppity, like they didn’t want us living in their attics no more when there wasn’t enough tree space to go around, and they got all possessive about their rasberries like they didn’t want us to have none.  There’s enough for everyone people. And tomatoes. Heck you never seen somebody so mad as when they see one of us has taken a couple bites out of their little stinky tomato. Sometimes we just do it to piss em off. its not like we even like tomatoes. At least I don’t.

Being a squirrel can be terrifying. It’s not all fun and games chasing each other around the tree. You hear stories of somebody’s mom being trapped and taken across the river or a  friend getting stuck in between the walls of a house, just adyin’ there real slow. Starving. Or getting caught in a trap and then being hooked up to a car exhaust pipe and
exterminated. Some folks, I heard, even think that’s a “humane” way to get rid of us. Since we heard that, we had a council meeting and decided we can’t let our brothers and sisters be marched off to the gas chambers just because some uppity homeowner doesn’t want us chewing through their screen windows. So we devised a plan to set them free whenever one got caught in the trap. I mean we give them a hard time first before letting them out. “Didn’t you notice you were walking into a trap, Stanley?” Yeah, yeah the
peanut butter smelled good and it was your favorite kind, the one with little peanut chunks in it, not too big not too small just the right size. But the metal cage, Stanley. Pay attention.” After shaming them a little bit but trying not to go too far, we let them go. Now how do we do it? Well early one morning while you were probably layin in bed, we got up real close to one of those traps and studied it very closely, and Becky went into the garage through a little hole we had chewed in the door and found the manual a lyin’ there on the shelf. Now we can’t read so don’t get any ideas about that, but there were some rather hard to decipher illustrations in that there manual. How do you guys even figure out how to assemble things? Anyway, we passed them around and discussed what they meant and pretty soon we had figured out how to operate the trap.

So then we became the release squad. We signed up for shifts each night going around releasing our brothers and sisters in need. We were discouraged, prohibited even, from signing up for too many shifts so that we would still have energy for our real life activities, such as nest repair, birdseed thieven, burying acorns. and making baby squirrels. One night we found a pair of turtles in a trap. How they got in there i have
no idea. We debated leaving them in there but in the end we let them out. At last we tried to, e opened the door and tried to motion to them to turn around and exit the death chamber but they just stayed there staring at us with their beady turtle eyes. Ah,, it was late so we decided to call it a night and just went back to our drey.

Anyway, those are the kinds of things we do to adapt to life in the city. It’s always a changin but our forebears decided to come here and make a new life for themselves and that’s what we are going to keep on doing. Sometimes change can be a good thing. Like all thee new foods being tossed out that we aint never tried before. My son Johnny really has a thing for bulgogi. Well, all Korean food really.