The Wilderness Between

Fall has come. The air is crisp with a chill that already steals into your bones if you let it. But I’ll pull my coat a little closer to keep warm.

With fall, death has come, both figurative and literal. Brown leaves skitter across the wood, and corpses of bees lie strewn up and down the steps. The spiders have taken the hint and have abandoned their webs, leaving their homes to the merciless autumn wind. Only my ivy remains vibrantly green, stretching its roots into the warm earth.

I’ve never noticed how the leaves in the trees sound different once fall comes. When the trees rustle in summer, it sounds like they are whispering secrets to each other like children in their tree forts. Or maybe they are chuckling, basking in the sun. But in fall, the rustle sounds more like a shiver. Sounds more like an old man shaking the cold from his bones.

Then again, perhaps the sounds themselves don’t change; rather, the crispness, the coolness, the thinness of the air now changes the sound as it hits my ears.

There is a new sound too, besides the wind. The squirrels have come to life in these parts now that a chill has set in. Now, I see them everywhere, hear them chattering and romping across the tin roof, scurrying to fill their underground stores before the first snow falls.

It is interesting to me, the way I can categorize the places I’ve lived by the squirrels.

In St. Louis, the squirrels are bigger than in Pittsburgh, but nearly all of them are grey. They are more skittish than most because of our pets. They are also known as bullies around the birdfeeders; scavengers, they take where they can and as much as they can until their food source is taken away by angry bird fans.

Galesburg had the biggest squirrels I had ever seen and ever hope to see. They practically ran the campus. They were big and fat, and their coloring was fantastic: a sort of reddish brown. They are mostly friendly, but I know more than a few students who have been bullied by pushy squirrels. One of the most memorable sights I saw on Knox’s campus was a squirrel, running through the grass with half of a bagel in its mouth and some angry student shouting after it.