A sample of the more than five hundred poems, stories, and essays published in “Northland Nature,” a weekly column in the Arizona Daily Sun. Clear Creek, a collection of selected essays that originally appeared in the column, was published in November 2014 by Glen Lyon Press.
THE SQUIRREL IN THE PINE
Mid June 1985
He knew that Mondays were good for solitude. His two older daughters had left for the South Rim at four this morning, setting an example for early rising. He himself had been considering a sunrise drive to Hart Prairie ever since he and his wife had suppered beside Fern Mountain Tank and then cruised Bismark Ridge in the comforting light of a full moon. The coyotes that evening either had not barked in chorus or had been too far away to be heard. But the tank had been as brim full as his heart, and the meadow had been splashed a delicate reddish-pink from the massed blooms of prairie smoke.
Falling back to sleep, he had awakened at seven and begun his hurried preparations. He had placed, along with a half roll of Scott towels, four ripe bananas in a brown grocery bag. He had added honey-oat bars, jack cheese, hard rolls, and oranges, which he would peel with his Buck knife.
By the time he had roused and dressed his wife, it was already eight-thirty, hardly an early start. And when his youngest daughter reminded him she needed a ride to her noon English class, he knew that they would have to take a shorter drive. It was then that he remembered a seldom used forest road that wound up a limestone canyon to a stock tank set between great grass-covered banks. They might breakfast there in a silence broken only by the caroling of a distant robin, the cry of a young Stellar’s jay, or the admonishing chuck of an Arizona grey squirrel.
After lifting his wife into the front seat, he propped up her left side and arm with two small pillows. Moments later he swung her folded wheel chair over the dented tailgate and onto the horsehair blanket that covered the cargo floor of the station wagon. Beside it he placed the metal foot rests and her wide brimmed straw hat.
During the drive down Lake Mary Road, she gazed out the windshield. Whenever he called her attention to something of interest, her farsighted eyes received the images and sent them along, but her mind seemed slow to process the information. She made little response and soon fell into a twilight sleep.
Chalk-white limestone lined the double, dust-grey tracks of the road he now followed. How much does she remember of her past life, he wondered, and what kind of a world does she live in? Though now she rarely spoke except in answer to a repeated question, she still smiled freely and sometimes she’d softly laugh when he said something that amused her. Though the four years of her illness had clouded her mind and sapped her strength, her eyes still followed his movements with devotion.
After parking in the shade of three tall pines, he lifted her into her wheel chair and pushed her up the long slope to the level top of the earthen dam. After scanning the broad meadow and the surrounding woods, he began their sylvan and sunlight breakfast. He fed his wife slowly, trying to judge when she was ready for another
bite of cheese, piece of roll, or mouthful of banana. Since she had difficulty swallowing, it was a game he often lost. But she seemed to enjoy the Valencia oranges, which he sectioned and seeded for her.
The sun was strong and the day hot, even for mid June. When a breeze sprang up, he received it gratefully. White butterflies drifted above the top-heavy grasses. How clearly did she see them; how long would she remember? As usual he ate what she discarded, finished what she was unable to finish. From time to time she took a sip of water from the flask. It was more than a shared meal, it was a life sustaining ritual. But to what end? For the most part his grief was mild, his sadness muted by time and acceptance. Often he felt an inner happiness that to some might seem unnatural. But they had loved so deeply and so freely he could not be ungrateful. His inner peace expressed a gratitude that was as natural and inevitable as death. They had been given so much. He could not sustain a sense of tragedy in the presence of so much remembered joy.
As he sat in the grass beside her, looking out across the sun-greened meadow, she patted his shoulder softly with her right hand, the wrist as slender as grass. As he had been for thirty years, he was in love with her likeness, the image, the person, the physical presence. Sight and sound had always been strong in his life. He was both visual and verbal, and landscapes spoke to him like the curve of this woman’s shoulder. A wildflower meadow was the lift of her chin, offering a visual glory, an infinite wealth of detail–the sway of a pine bough, the glint of a single needle.
While she slept under her straw hat, her head bowed to her chest, her right hand gripping the padded arm of her wheel chair, he stood and stretched and wandered along the rim of the tank and down into the lower meadow. He realized that there was something to be said for the deaths of those ancestral Scots whose lives had ended at the end of a rope, under the blade of an ax, or with the thrust of a sword. But he was grateful that her illness, a prolonged dying, was not marked by suffering. Discomfort, yes, and sometimes mental anguish and physical frustration, but nothing persistent or unbearable in the course of her progressive illness. He wondered what his response would be were the situation different–how strong was his instinct to protect her! But, of course, it was an unanswerable question.
As he circled south through the meadow and back towards the tank, he passed an isolated stand of pines–tall, aged, and shade heavy. As he came within ten feet of the largest, an Arizona grey squirrel, its movements calm and deliberate, climbed higher on the trunk to observe him. Clinging head down to the stub of a branch, it lifted its head and stared straight into his eyes. He noted the white belly and feet, the dark grey back, the grey and white tail. He looked deeply into its large black eyes.
There was a moment of silent communication, intense, interested, unfrightened. He knew at once that he loved this grey squirrel–the shrewd cock of its head, the trim black whiskers, the beautiful fullness of its arched but motionless tail. He wondered at this wild and woodland personality who questioned his presence at the foot of its favorite pine. What was its world like? What did it remember? Finally, with a flick of its tail, it spoke to him, a soft and repeated “wuk, wuk, wuk, wuk,” as if it asked the unthreatening stranger “what, what, what, what?”
He knew he could not answer.