It's Not Actually Nuts

by Wendy Perrotti

There's a squirrel banging on the glass door.

I’ve lived in the northeast all of my life and I can tell you with certainty…this is unusual behavior for squirrels.

Naturally, there’s a simple answer.

Paul’s been feeding them.

We went from a yard full of skittish squirrels…to several timid little creatures grabbing nuts off the porch railing…to the newly emboldened who ate them a few feet away from us…to Paul hand feeding them…to them now, knocking on our door, asking to be fed.

Even the cats, who used to love chasing squirrels, are behaving differently.  AJ got up onto his hind legs, tapped one who was munching a peanut on the railing, then sat back down again.

Cat and squirrel remained completely un-phased in a perfect illustration that anything is possible.

Let’s make the assumption – and I think it’s a fair one – that if squirrels had dream goals, being handed an assortment of nuts everyday would be high on that list.

It’s also reasonable to assume that giant, unpredictable humans and utterly predictable (they will chase you) cats would be potentially terrifying obstacles to achieving that goal.

I’ll go a step further and say that most squirrels wouldn’t have dreamed big enough to allow for the possibility of such fortune in the first place.

Who among them has ever dared imagine that a place so plentiful – where the bounty of one squirrel's winter stockpile, no matter how large, has no bearing on the potential of another’s – could actually exist in the very place where he had been living all along?

Here's the thing. One of them did.

On a hot day, Paul noticed a squirrel lapping up some water left from condensation on a glass, so he put a little dish of water on the railing.

The squirrel left a clam shell as a gift.

Not knowing it was a gift, Paul kept chucking into the garden.

It reappeared - each time, in a more prominent spot - until he realized it was for him.

 That's when he bought the nuts.

One persistent squirrel set off a chain of events that created a new reality.

Here's something you can trust.

Everything you do that’s different from what you’ve always done will lead to somewhere new.

Some of those places will be disappointing and a few may be downright horrible.
Many will be wonderfully surprising.
And some, I can promise you, will be sheer magic.

What are you waiting for?