Dear Nina,
I was laying in your bed minding my own business, slowly returning to
wakefulness, when in my sleepy haze I heard the noise of glasses and
plates being prepared for food. The elevator was going up and down, and
the neighbors were opening and closing doors. The day was just starting
and people were waking up, so all seemed as it should be.
The sound of plates and glasses continued, I started to wonder if I was
hearing someone else’s kitchen, or if you for some reason had returned
home. It seemed odd that you would be here, and I hadn’t heard you come
in, and I concluded that the noises must be coming from your kitchen, so I
decided, despite my better judgment, that I was going to get up and
investigate.
I walked very deliberately but cautiously towards the kitchen. Someone
was definitely in there! Nobody was at the table, so I peeked around the
fridge. The floor creaked, and that’s when it jumped out of the cabinet.
At first I thought it was a giant rat. It scrambled onto the counter,
under the grate on the fence, and out the window. Once outside, it
apparently felt it was safe, and remained lounging around on the fire
escape. It was the squirrel!
The cabinets seemed mostly undisturbed. Some tea had fallen to the floor
when I disrupted the squirrel’s raid, so I put things back in place.
Nothing seemed to match what I expected a squirrel to be interested in.
Tea? Vitamins? The old tenants must have fed it something else from
those cabinets, and now it was just an old squirrel with old habits that
refused to die. I went back the couch and started writing this email.
Just now, as I sat here, I could see the squirrel on the fire escape. It
waited a few minutes as I wrote the first half of this letter, then decided
it was time to try its luck again. It jumped onto the window sill, and
seemed prepared to get back into the kitchen in a moment. I again walked
to the kitchen, up to the window. The squirrel was not impressed. It
stood watching me. I watched it. A few minutes passed until it decided
that yes, I was bigger than it. So it moved slowly back down the fire
escape, and continued to look over its shoulder at me. It’s a fat old
squirrel.
Again, I examined your cabinets to figure out what could be driving the
squirrel to such excitement. Then I saw it. Your giant bag of walnuts
had a few holes poked in it! I closed the window.
amos