Greaaaat… Nope. Can’t. At least not yet. Broken? Let’s see, try again. Nope. “MICHELLE!” hoping she can hear from inside. Waiting, all dignified-like, (splat, more like) dressed for the occasion in a (thankfully long) black skirt. Car drives by–yo? No? Well, this is embarrassing.
“MICHELLE!”
She’d been just on the other side of the wall in the living room and heard me. She came out and down the walk at about the same time the neighbor across the street came out and, seeing me being rescued, ducked gracefully away.
No, can’t get up that way, hon, that hip, that arm, nuh uh. Let’s try that. Slowly. Gently. Thanks.
“Mom, I know you don’t use the cane around the house, but maybe you should start now.”
I seem not to have broken anything after all. Maybe 50 is just the new 50.
Meantime, *brushing myself off, icepacks in place*, I do need to report on those squirrels. Those pistachios? They were all gone the next morning. Curious. So I put some more out to see; they’re a bit stale but not so much so as to feel guilty over feeding them to the wildlife.
It has been very entertaining and I’ll be sorry when they’re all gone. A little black squirrel went YEEhaw! and came leaping the moment I pulled that sliding glass door shut behind me. So much for the picky eating of the day before. It was, though, watching it go at it, clearly a tough nut to crack; the little thing finally grabbed it in its teeth and ran for the grass and started digging furiously. Toasted Pistachio trees, here we come! Grow your own!
Today they’d all gotten the hang of opening them and there were strewn shells for the first time. What quite surprised me was the bluejay swooping down and grabbing one, its jaws pried wide open around that thing as it flew off. It hadn’t deigned to give those shells the slightest glance the first day but now it was all about the panache of the pistache.
It takes the squirrels awhile to get at their Crackerjack prize inside the box. Today, they mostly didn’t want to work at it out in the open on the porch. I wanted to watch them at it, and it became a game: I sat in front of the window reading, and they would wait till the moment I was engrossed in the page and then they would sneak up, grab one, and run for the trees. I would look up and count one shell gone and even my peripheral vision had missed it, but they’d be up there, gnawing away. I was only entirely sure that that was what was going on when I caught one at it.
Maybe I should only go out to get the mail or paper with a bag of pistachios in hand, so the bluejays can levitate me as they try to thieve the things out of here. UP!