Michigan update

 Michigan update 

My daughter’s backyard is enclosed by a tall wooden fence. Not sure why; they’re just renting. Prior owners had an above ground pool—we can tell by the dead grass ring. Anyway . . .

I observe from the kitchen window while doing up breakfast dishes: highchair tray, messy bibs, Pyrex containers of past lunches taken to work—I see the squirrels busy, using the fence as a sort of race track. With their little legs they scamper along the tight-rope thin top to their favorite trees and hiding places, a kind of aerial causeway.

And why do I notice this? I stop and wonder. Is it because my life has gotten smaller, more minute? Or, perhaps, because my mind is no longer clouded, crowded with worry, stress, occluded by the day’s news?

I do worry about climate change, my grandson’s future, if there will be snow, health care—but the place in my soul where I harbored these things—migrant issue at the borders of Poland, the conflict in Ethiopia, the Sudan, Covid-19 deaths, Ahmaud Arbery’s trial—has shrunk. I care, but am not crushed.

So I watch the squirrels run, their rush to beat winter, store up food, prepare for the end of days.