God Drives a Tow Truck (20 page)

His eyes were glued shut, still so new to life as to not yet have opened his eyes, and he was the size of a mouse. His tail had sparse fur on it, but his body was fully furry. While he slept in my hand, I went on-line, and researched baby squirrels. I found that he was probably about six weeks old, and that the first thing one should do upon finding an abandoned baby was feed it Gatorade. Then the finder should put it back near the place where the baby had fallen, as often the mother will return. The rain had slackened, so I scurried to the back yard to scout for the nest. It lay shattered on the ground, near our back fence. I bundled the baby in a box and laid it on the ground by the nest. With hands cupped around my coffee mug, I sat across the lawn to wait. After two hours, there was no sign of any squirrel coming to find her baby. I returned with my squirrel to the warm house.
By now, Asherel had awakened and saw me with the little towel sheltered against my chest.
"Look," I told her, "It wasn't a rat... and it wasn't dead. It is a baby squirrel."
Warm and dry, and fed now, the little squirrel was captivatingly cute.
Asherel was smitten.
"What will we do?" she asked, taking the little appealing bundle from me.
"We need to buy squirrel formula and a bottle," I said, now armed with rescue information I had found online.
"What should we name it?" she asked.
"How about Squirrel Nutkin?" I suggested, remembering the Beatrix Potter character from a beloved book from my childhood.
For the next week, we fed Nutkin every two hours, all day. Squirrels, even as young as Nutkin, do not nurse at night. This is a very intelligent plan of the squirrel designer. I don't know why He didn't design human infants similarly. It is why squirrel mothers are always bright eyed and busy tailed, but new human mothers look like the walking dead.

Continuing to research squirrel rescue, I discovered that it is illegal for a non-certified person to keep a baby squirrel, and most would die if they did not receive the proper care and antibiotics. Knowing this, I dolefully told Asherel that we needed to find a squirrel rescue group. She of course cried, but understood, wanting Nutkin to thrive.

Where does one find something so specialized? Amazingly, we found a “certified squirrel rescue” in the yellow pages of the phone book. The Squirrel Therapist implored us to rush Nutkin to her by the next day, at the latest. She made it clear that while we may have meant well, without training, we were likely hurting Nutkin.

He seemed healthy, however. He was vigorous, and had an enormous appetite. His tail had begun to burst with luxurious fur, and he was learning to walk. Nonetheless, the squirrel lady warned us that in addition to requiring trained care to survive, he needed to be raised with other squirrels or he would not learn how to be a squirrel. I was a little confused by this, as really, how hard could it be? It’s not like squirrels need to learn to balance a checkbook or program computers. A squirrel’s most daunting task, from my albeit uniformed perspective, is to run across a road right as a car is coming , and learn to avoid all four wheels.

Nonetheless, the Squirrel Therapist had a little female baby squirrel the same age who needed a squirrel friend. She had been praying someone would show up with one, but this early in the spring, knew it was unlikely. Nutkin was an answer to her prayer, and I had long since learned that one doesn’t mess around when God is dangling prayer warriors in your face.

“Where do you live?” I asked.

“I live near Concord, but if you can bring him to my job, that would be best, and is probably closer to you.”
“Where do you work?”
“The Raptor Center,” she said.

It didn’t occur to me how ironic that was until I was relating the story much later to someone, and they raised their eyebrow at that portion of my tale.

“You brought a baby squirrel to a raptor center?” he asked, with a smirk, “They told you they were going to save it? Uh huh.”

Fortunately, the idea that they might have less altruistic plans for my Nutkin never entered my mind. In the end, all worked out perfectly, and Nutkin ended up in capable hands…not talons.
The next day, we drove to the Raptor Center, and relinquished Nutkin. The Squirrel Therapist praised his glossy coat, full belly, and beautiful tail. I didn't tell her I felt his beautiful fat body was due to the pure cream we mixed in with his formula, since that was not proper squirrel diet. This is probably because few squirrels have the skill to latch onto cow udders in the wild, but I am sure if they could, they would.

She said she would start him on antibiotics right away, as pneumonia was very common with creatures fed by untrained people. However, she seemed surprised by his evident health in the hands of troglodytes like us.
"Can we visit him?" asked Asherel, a little dejectedly as she pet him goodbye.
"Of course!" said the kind woman.
And we did visit him, once, shortly before he was to be released to the wild. He was friendly, and even more adorable, if possible, than when we had last seen him. His eyes were wide open, and sparkling brown. He fought with his "sister" over a piece of apple, wrestling her in the cage and tumbling onto his back, screeching at her all the while. The Squirrel Therapist let Asherel hold him, and he scampered up and down her arm, like on a tree limb.

Happily, I watched Nutkin, poised on the cusp of his release back to the wild. I was proud for our role in his survival, and grateful for people who care enough about all of God’s creatures that they would become certified to rescue what is considered by many to be just a birdseed thieving rodent.

However, even more amazing was the gentle sweetness of Lucky, who was the real hero. Lucky, who was hard wired to be a predator, had somehow mustered something instead that looked a lot like compassion.

I think my little squirrel tale is one of the myriad small miracles that happen every day. The predator nature of a dog was squelched, and a tiny creature that most dogs would have eaten, was instead revived by a dog’s warm tongue. A little lonely squirrel, deprived of mother and nest, needed another little squirrel to learn together what it meant to be squirrels. How loving of God to let us be the instrument by which He accomplished that gentle, tender plan. What a sweet reminder that we are all in this together, and sometimes, suppressing our natural, baser instincts leads to life; abundant life and luxurious tails.

Chapter 31

A Snake in the Hallway

Genesis 4: 7

⁷
If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.

My second son Matt is a joy to my soul. He calls me or emails me often, sends me songs he has written, asks me for advice. He is artistic and loves music, and deep thought and provocative questions. He wrestles with concepts that many people never think about. He never settles for superficial understanding. He is a man after my own heart. I would adore him even if he were not my son.

However, he is a slob. I say that with the utmost love and respect. When he comes home from college, his bags, and suitcases, and boxes and books land in a heap which he promises is only temporary. And then like dust, new heaps settle on top of old heaps and he has to tunnel out of his room.

My mother’s philosophy with my brother, a similar organizationally-challenged type, was to just shut the door on his room. When he was engaged to his wonderful Jenny, my mother brought Jenny to John’s room, warning her that she needed to understand what she was getting into by marrying John. Mom shoved open the door. If Jenny still wanted to marry him after seeing his room, then the marriage might last.

I have a hard time with my mother’s style of benign neglect. I am a little more the “scream like a wild banshee” sort. But I have to admit that I met my match in Matt. No amount of ranting and raving ever succeeding in helping him maintain a clean and orderly room. Out of necessity for sanity maintenance, I began to close my eyes when I walked near his open door. Usually his visits from college were brief, and even someone with the clutter capacity of my son could not do too much damage in a few days.

However, the summer was another matter. For nearly three months, Matt’s floor never saw the light of day. I begged him, implored him, shrieked at him to clean the mess or something awful would happen. I tried to teach him that if our world is disorganized, our mind will be disorganized. It was all to no avail. The depth of debris rose by the hour, like a flood.

Coincidentally, we began to develop a mouse problem. When I went to bed I could hear them gnawing inside the walls. Occasionally, one would scamper across our bedroom floor. This was disturbing, but I love all creatures and did not want to kill them. I set out “humane” traps, and quickly caught a mouse a day. I would then carry them off to a field a mile away and release them. Let them enter someone else’s house.

However, the gnawing sounds continued. One night, a mouse ran on top of my covers right across my reclining body. I shrieked and realized we had a problem. Arvo set
real
traps and we found many dead mice. The gnawing sounds multiplied.

The last straw was the morning I peered at a trap and saw it was sprung, but there was no mouse… just a trail of blood. With horror, I realized that a decapitated mouse was haunting our house somewhere. This was the end of peaceful coexistence. I called Terminix. Bring in the atomic bombs, I told them. There are bloody mice wandering our home and they must be destroyed.

The exterminator promised he would arrive at one o’clock. In a flurry, I began to vacuum, not wanting him to see the conditions that had likely led to our infestation. As I approached Matt’s room, the nucleus of the problem no doubt, I was humming a tune, “Three blind mice….”

Distractedly, I glanced up as I rounded the corner to the hallway, and there, on the floor, with its unblinking black eyes, was a four foot copperhead snake. I shrieked and backed off. Asherel called out, “Is something wrong?”

“Grab the dogs, throw them out and do NOT leave the sunroom,” I bellowed, and burst into tears.

With great gnashing of teeth, and buckets of weeping, I peered around the corner. The snake remained along the hallway wall, unmoving except for the disgusting flick of its tongue. I raced to the phone and called my husband.

“I am ok,” I sobbed, “But get home NOW. There is a copperhead snake in the hallway. I don’t know what to do. Oh help, oh help….what do I do????”

My dear husband was masterful at detecting hysteria. He calmly told me to watch the snake to see where it went, and he would be home in twenty minutes.

Watch the snake?! Watch that flicking evil tongue, those dark unblinking eyes… that slithering squirming tail? I would rather be boiled in hot oil… but realized the absolute
ONLY
thing worse than having a copperhead snake in the house, was having a copperhead snake in the house and not knowing where it was.

So I shoved a bar stool over near the hallway, climbed atop it with my phone in hand, and peered around the corner. Watching the snake was torture, absolute torture. I could not stop crying, as I forced myself to gaze upon this ancient symbol of all things evil and Satanic. Fifteen long, slow minutes passed, and then, horror of horrors, the snake began to move. It began to slimily slither back towards Matt’s room, towards that den of impossible clutter with literally millions of hiding places. And the door was closed. It began to slide under the door.

No, no, no, I whispered. Do not do that! Do not make me have to open that door. Oh, oh, oh! It is too horrible. The horror, the horror!

As the snake’s tail disappeared under the doorway, I knew I had no choice but to leave my stool and open the door. My sobs were violent now as I did this awful thing. I opened the door, tears streaming down my terrified face.

“Can I see?” called Asherel from the sunroom.

“NO!” I wailed, “Do not leave the sunroom!”

The snake was slithering towards the dresser. Beyond the dresser lay the most impossible avenue of cluttered escape. If it got to the dresser, we would have no choice but to torch our home.

“Oh please, please, please God, don’t let it get behind the dresser….”

Just as its tail disappeared behind the dresser, Asherel shouted, “Dad’s home!”

My hero came racing in, brandishing a golf club.