We Don’t Want Your Nuts

We were just walking out the door, and the squirrel was foraging in the little patch of landscaping past the mailboxes. The squirrel would have gone unnoticed, but it jerked into motion just as we walked past. It spiraled down the tree trunk and scrambled across the ground, disturbing a flurry of leaves. Then it heaved itself over the ledge, pitched itself across the parking lot without touching the ground, and dove between the wire’s of the neighbor’s fence.

I had to replay the scene to figure out if we’d been doing something alarming enough to cause the squirrel’s to react in such a panicky unsquirrellike manner.