Weeds, and The Squirrels at High Noon

Thurber once wrote about an odd fellow with some annoying habits, who used to haunt the halls of his literary cocktail parties . One of his more annoying habits was to pick up some common-place object, such as a light bulb, and present it to the group with dramatic flourish, announcing that he had just invented this thing called a “light bulb”. He would pronounce those two words slowly, as if no one had ever heard of them before. After having the audience repeat the words “light bulb” in unison several times he would continue on to demonstrate — see? — how you could screw the thing into another device he invented called a “light socket”, and when you throw a switch, the room is filled with light. “Just a little something I’ve been playing around with,” the fellow would claim, “I think it might sell. What do you think?”.

I sometimes wonder if these online notes from my Connecticut Journal are cut from a similar cloth. “Look,” I will say, “I have discovered these things I call trees. And over here is a long-eared thing I call a rabbit.” Readers who hail from a less urban landscape than is seen in Southern California might roll their eyes at each other, amused at the stop-the-presses discoveries of this brave pioneer into the demi-wilds of semi-suburban New England. Whether or not this is the case, the fact remains that it is all new to me.

It is in that spirit that I report to you now about some things called weeds.

Apparently, if you surround a house in the woods with a flower bed, plant flowers in that flower bed, and then let a summer’s worth of rainstorms come and go, all sorts of other plants begin to appear that you had not planted, which they call weeds. The owners of the house were going to be coming by this weekend to pick up their mail, and so we took it upon ourselves to go out and try to clear out some of the weeds before they arrived. After three hours digging around on a warm and muggy afternoon we were able to make some progress. We were drenched in sweat and filled an entire wheel barrow with weeds We had to stop though when it got to the point that we could no longer tell what was a weed and what was a flower.

Gigi called a gardener who came out and weeded the place yesterday. By the end of the day the house was bordered by what looked like a garden, with identifiable plants each in their own spot, the rest of the ground nearby clean and bare. When he had finished, Paul the Gardener showed me around, describing what he had cleared away, and pointed to some little plants he uncovered which turned out to be strawberry. He said he had to stop because he got to the point where he couldn’t tell what was a weed and what wasn’t. Guess it happens to everybody.

“Don’t know if you want to mulch or not,” he said. “Not much time left before winter comes.” I nodded my head as if I had some clue what mulching was and how one did it, leaving aside for the moment the issue of how one would know whether one wanted to do it or not before the winter came.

It seems like I often find myself in the situation of nodding my head in response to someone speaking about some facet of life about which I am completely ignorant but which they assume as a matter of course that I am intimately familiar. At long last I have come to terms with this by concluding that, early in my grade school years, there was some absolutely essential class, possibly called “How The World Works,” in which the teacher sat all the kids down and explained everything they were going to need to know to get through life in an ordered, systematic way, find a purpose in life, avoid catastrophic relationships, and in the end how to be happy — but that I was out sick that week and missed the class.

Squirrels
I was not aware of the ferocity of the turf wars that went on between squirrels. Gigi had noted that there were a lot of squirrels running around lately, which reminded me that while she was out in Texas I was witness one day to a small event of high drama in our backyard. There were two squirrels chasing each other around with a bit more energy than I was used to associating with squirrels. It seemed to be some sort of land dispute, centered on the picnic table under one of the larger trees. One of the squirrels was sitting in the middle of the bench seat of the table, staring down another squirrel which was clinging to the tree. If the bench squirrel had been a lizard he would have been doing push-ups (the way lizards do), but as it was he was just staring at the other one. I assume that they were both males; it didn’t seem like a mating dance at any rate.

At some point the squirrel on the tree decided to throw down the gauntlet, and ran over to the picnic table to challenge his foe. But before he got up onto the bench the other squirrel had already leapt off of the bench and laid claim to the spot on the tree where the other one had just been. And so this dance went for a while, to the point that it was not clear who was chasing whom. At long last one of squirrels decided (by whatever mental capacity squirrel brains have to make choices) to hold their ground on the picnic table bench, so that when the other one ran over and hopped up onto the bench, the two squirrels were now face to face, waiting to see who would blink first. If you wanted to add some additional drama to the event, I seem to recall that this was around lunchtime, and so it could very well have been High Noon. Neither squirrel looked much like Ian Macdonald, but one of them had a bit of Gary Cooper’s squint (or was that Clint Eastwood?). They stared at each other for a long time.

In any case, it was a bit of an anti-climax, but I had to go back to work and never found out how the crisis was resolved. It has been a couple of weeks now and I have not seen a similar battle flare up since then. All I can assume is that the squirrels realized that they were not going to be able to settle this amicably, and so they sought out a third party for binding arbitration.