Asakiyume mita

I was at an event last week, a breakfast event, and I was sitting at a table with people I didn't know, but we were all making conversation, and somehow the talk turned to animal visitors, and one woman started talking about how a squirrel had been paying them visits over the summer:

I left the window open, and there's no screen, but I didn't worry about anything getting in because we're on the second floor. But I had a bowl of nuts on the kitchen table, and it kept on going down. I kept on refilling it--I thought my husband was eating the nuts. But it was a squirrel. A squirrel was coming in and eating the nuts! But you know, squirrels are like cats. If they like you, they'll leave you something, as a present. Better than a cat's present! Well I guess the squirrel liked us, because one day I came into the kitchen and there was a doughnut on the table.

"Is this your doughnut?" I asked my husband.

"No, it's not mine. I thought it was your doughnut."

"If it was my doughnut, do you think it would be sitting here, uneaten?"

It was the squirrel. It had had so many of our nuts, it decided to leave us a doughnut.

Now maybe the squirrel just happened to be carrying a doughnut it had pilfered from somewhere else, and it set it down to much on some more of this woman's nuts and then scampered off in a panic, forgetting its doughnut. But I really like the woman's interpretation of the events.

I was walking balanced on a train rail this morning and thinking about how I can do this so confidently, so easily, because if I fall, it's just four inches to the ground, but if this same rail were over a chasm, I'd never be able to manage it. I'd freeze with terror.

If I could have the same confidence walking over a chasm that I have balancing on the rail--wow, that would be marvelous.

But I do sometimes fall off the rail, so I'd probably fall into the chasm. But, until I did, I'd be as joyous as Philippe Petit.

So then I started thinking about when I'm walking around in my own house, not balancing on anything. What if, unbeknownst to me, really I'm on the thinnest of rails--or even a wire--and at any moment I might fall?

The Curious Case of the Woman Too Terrified to Walk

No, better the other way, definitely. Better to be as carefree at great heights as if the ground were only inches away.

.... subject change.

It's the season to gather stinging nettle shoots, and I did, not to make shirts for wild swans (or skinchangers, csecooney!), but for soup (soup that I will go make, soon as I post this entry). Two kinds of chickens watched me as I gathered: russety red ones (probably Rhode Island reds), and salt-and-pepper ones (probably Marans).

Back at the house, a squirrel has been gorging itself on willow blossoms all day. Feasting on flowers. What a season!



ETA I stung myself on the stinging nettles, putting them into the pot. Just a little. Just enough to be fun and to make me think, *yes*, these are stinging nettles.