Folks who followed me on social media (I am blessedly withdrawn from social media. Let’s pray it lasts.) might remember last summer when we had a squirrel in our attic. When patching the hole in the eave the squirrel entered through, a nest of newborn baby squirrels tumbled out. I ended up locating a squirrel rescue and drove the bundle deep into the woods northeast of Wilmington and dropped the squirrel babies off with a woman who takes in abandoned critters of all kinds, nurses them, and then releases them into the wild.
Well, this morning I woke up at 6:00 a.m. and finished my writing by 8:00, and then I puttered around the house with Mallory and the girls before heading to Ghost Hill Press for their Curated Saturday event, where I hung out in the store until 2:00 p.m. to handsell my favorite books. We had a great turnout and it was a lot of fun. If you missed the link to my favorite books, you can find it here for books and here for audiobooks.
When I came home, the house was empty, so I ate lunch and got back to work compiling the incredibly long list of favorite books that so many readers have shared with me. You can find that running list here.
I took a break and decided to do some quick yard work, so I went out the side door and surprised a squirrel near the utility building where we keep all the lawn stuff. It was fussing like crazy. I unlocked the building and got out the weed eater and walked to the front yard, where I found a tiny, pink newborn squirrel abandoned in the grass. I assume that I spooked the mother when I came out, and she dropped the squirrel and skedaddled. I scooped it up and put it under my shirt and held it against my skin to keep it warm, and then I came inside and put a rice-filled heating pad in the microwave. Once it was warm I dropped it in the shoebox with the baby and some cloth napkins. I went outside to retrieve the weed eater (I wasn’t doing any yard work today because I was visiting the squirrel lady again.) Imagine my surprise when I looked down and saw another baby squirrel. Twins?
I couldn’t find the phone number for the squirrel lady I used last summer, so I took the box into the backyard and downloaded baby squirrel sounds on my ipad and left it sitting beside the box. I waited at the window for over an hour, and while plenty of squirrels visited the bird feeders (I can’t keep them off the damn things) not a single one of them seemed interested in rescuing their baby brethren. But I got to see a lot of nature - hummingbirds, a baby rabbit, countless birds of all kinds - that I otherwise wouldn’t have seen if I hadn’t kept vigil for so long. I finally got in touch with a rescue that would take the babies.
By the time Mallory and the girls got home from Mallory’s grandparents’ house I had the babies packed up and ready to transport. The girls got a quick look at their tiny, pink wiggling bodies, and then it was off to the squirrel saviors.