SQUIRRELING AWAY: THRIFTY HARVEST-TIME HABIT

Along about this time of the year something triggers the Squirrel Nutkin Syndrome in me. This is characterized by a tendency to start poking away into some odd places an extra can of hominy, kraut, green beans, etc. "Because," justifies the syndrome. "There'll be days, maybe even weeks, next winter when you can't negotiate the ice-covered driveway."

These commodities mentioned above and others take their usual place on cabinet shelves during spring and summer, but when the Syndrome strikes and these shelves are full, there they go, onto a little shelf I've built on the back of ascending stairways, into a three-tiered wire basket hanging from a basement beam, into a peculiar little shelved space between refrigerator and chimney, reached only by a long arm because the stove is in the way.

I don't ever remember being snowed or iced-in to the point of having to go hungry; it is just a leftover from farm days when we worked and stored all year, but especially when the sun began to be a little stingy with its daylight hours.

Beatrix Potter's "Squirrel Nutkin" was also a contributing factor to this hording instinct. I loved little feisty Squirrel Nutkin and his friends who started putting away hickory nuts and acorns into nooks and crannies when the autumn fires began to burn.

We think that squirrels bury nuts to assure their winter supply of food. Sometimes I wonder if we short-change squirrels' intelligence. Do they not know that a buried pecan, walnut, or acorn will sprout and grow a tree that sometime far down the line will feed their descendants? Every year I find a new little nut trees sprouting at the foot of some post, in the flower beds, at right angle house corners. Sometimes when I'm assigning such intelligence to squirrels it takes me three or four years to uproot the little saplings that would, in future years, crack my basement walls or uproot sidewalks.

I saw a young Squirrel Nutkin last week. He startled me. In the porch swing, as usual, I was admiring the blooming autumn clematis when, glancing upward, I saw this small face with ultra bright eyes peering at me over the edge of the porch roof. For a second or two we exchanged mutual stares. Maybe my eyes, being only slightly larger than his, made him retreat via an oak tree limb to the trunk of the tree and then up higher and higher as if he'd show me who had the "upper" hand or eyes.

For a while this summer, the squirrels were gone from my yard, my neighbor's too. We couldn't understand it. They usually play ball with our green tomatoes and then feast on them when they turn red. But they're back now. 'Most any time I step outside there is one stuffing himself with cracked corn and sunflower seeds I provide for the birds. My big bird feeder has two roofed compartments with a sheltered "hallway" in between. Here is where the squirrels like to dine. It cramps their tails a little, but not their style. The minute they hear the slightest little motion at the back door, they are "outta there, man."

I suppose there is something I could do to discourage this mooching off the birds but it would ruin the delightful architecture of the feeder and post, so I let them co-exist on the same food. If the bird feed budget gets depleted too quickly, I'll just put the feed in the squirrel-proof feeder only. That way, the seemingly more intelligent squirrels will just have to expend a little more effort and depleted their renewable stored food supply, and I won't have to subtract a can of beets or carrots from mine.

I walk on fallen acorns now, crushing them under my feet. It releases a good odor that sometimes mingles with burning leaves or trash where someone is tidying up the first scragglings of late summer. That odor, too, intensifies my SNS. I think to myself, this place I'm walking on now, before acorn-falling time again, might be covered with two feet of snow. The driveway will be a sheet of ice. The car won't start. Such thinking makes me pick up some hickory nuts form under the lone shagbarks, put them in my pocket, and bring home another handful of persimmons to dry in the sun. A real human nutkin am I.

REJOICE!