God Planned on the Forgetfulness of Squirrels
Which gives me hope for my squirrely brain
I’ve had a lifelong fascination with and an intense love for the environment. My father was a deer hunter, as were most of the men in my family, and I would sit for hours at their feet when they returned from their deer hunting trips to listen to what I called their “deer stories.”
There was a general “shooing” of the girls to go and “help Mom in the kitchen” but I could not be budged. I wanted to learn about the woods, not the chattery servitude of the ladies in the kitchen. What felt right to me was the stories of the weather, the wetness of socks while hiking, the snort of a deer that had picked up the hunter’s scent.
These men told their stories with passion. The attention to all the small details of nature that most people don’t even notice truly moved me as a child. Not to mention some of these stories were hysterical. Like the one where Big Johnny got into a pile of bees and ran straight up a mountain screaming. This was quite a feat for such a large man!
Or the one where my father was sitting with his back tucked into the fork of a tree and something caught the corner of his eye. He turned his head and with the bill of his cap pinned a snake to the tree. “Do you know how BIG a snake looks when it is right here?”…
