“Not guilty,” said Gertrude, “on all seventeen counts of Aggravated Hoarding.”

“Not guilty,” said Reginald, “on all four counts of Conspiring to Possess an Unreasonable Number of Conifer Cones.”

“Not guilty,” said Esmeralda, “on the charges of Territorial Scolding at Volumes Prejudicial to Forest Peace. The chickaree’s volume is not a prejudice. It is a feature. We will not punish a creature for its nature.” A pause. “The shadow count was already stricken. We will not speak of it again.”

The court erupted.

Percival sat down heavily and removed his spectacles, which had never helped him see anything more clearly anyway. The eastern grey colony conferred in anxious whispers. The black squirrels from the ravine looked at the ground. A Steller’s jay, who had wandered in halfway through the proceedings and had no stake in the outcome whatsoever, made a loud and inappropriate noise, as jays do.

Chonky Bill stood up. He had been thinking during the testimonies: about the caches he left in the dark that no one knew about, that no one claimed; about the midden at home that no one had ever approached and asked to share; about how easy it would have been, any morning, to just ask.

He chittered once, low and thoughtful, which in chickaree is not alarm and not territorial challenge and not courtship and is perhaps the closest thing the species has to a sigh.

“I have an idea,” he said.

Part Six: What Happened After

It started the following weekend, and it was Chonky Bill’s idea, and if anyone thought it was strange they were too interested to say so.

He held school.

Not formally. He simply went out into the fir forest, and when curious squirrels followed, and they did, because he was hard to ignore and rumor had made him fascinating, he showed them things: where the best cone-bearing firs were, the ones with the heaviest crop, the ones you could smell before you saw them if you knew what to sniff for; how to gnaw a stem cleanly so the cone fell where you intended; how to build a proper midden, not just a pile, but a system, layered so the older caches rotated to the front; how to read the weight of a winter by the thickness of a cone’s scales in September; how to approach the humans, which involved sitting nearby and making a specific conversational chitter that they responded to with remarkable generosity.

The eastern grey colony sent three young ones the first week. Then eight. The black squirrels from the ravine sent a delegation, which arrived with an air of great dignity and the faint uncomfortable energy of people who know they owe someone an apology and have decided to express it through punctuality and attentiveness.

Chonky Bill fed them peanuts and showed them the hollow root by the creek and did not mention the trial once. He did, however, drop a great many cones during the demonstrations, and some of them did land on people’s heads, and he showed absolutely no remorse about this because that is simply what chickarees do.

Part Seven: The Party

But before any of that, the very evening of the acquittal, while the owls were folding themselves back into the shadows and the court was dissolving into the ordinary forest, someone started the music.

No one was entirely sure who. It might have been the woodpecker, who had a natural talent for rhythm. It might have been the chickadees, who turned out to have opinions about tempo. But the music started, and it was the kind of music that has a beat you feel in your back feet before you hear it with your ears, and that was all it took.

Chonky Bill began to chitter. Then to churr. Then to issue forth, in the manner of his kind, a cascading fountain of barks and screeches and chirps and whistles that was, technically, a territorial display and also, technically, the best music anyone had heard in the forest in years. ‘Pillillooeet,’ he called, which the Native peoples of the old forests had named him for, and the sound rang from the firs and came back changed, and everyone’s feet began to move.

Squirrel skanking is difficult to describe to those who have never witnessed it. It involves the back feet doing one thing and the front feet doing another thing, and both things are emphatic, and the tail plays a complicated counterpoint role that takes years to master. It is, by any objective measure, an absolute spectacle. Chonky Bill’s version of it registered, faintly, on seismometers as far away as Portland.

The eastern grey colony skanked. The black squirrels from the ravine skanked with surprising grace. Percival skanked badly and with tremendous enthusiasm, his useless spectacles flying off and lost forever in the leaf litter, and if anything he seemed better for it. Two startled deer at the edge of the clearing exchanged a look, backed up three careful paces, and watched from a safe distance, because they had heard something about Chonky Bill’s gravitational field.

The Honorable Esmeralda watched from her branch with an expression that might, in certain lights, have been satisfaction.

“Does she ever skank?” someone asked.

“She did once,” said Gertrude, without looking up. “In 1987. The forest has not forgotten.”

The party lasted until the stars moved, and the moon came up enormous and orange over the old fir, and Bill’s voice wound down gradually from full territorial announcement to a low, contented churring, and the forest settled into the particular peace of a thing resolved.

In his midden, which was never locked, never truly guarded, Chonky Bill’s cones gleamed in the dark. Thousands of them, stacked with care, available to anyone who thought to ask.

And his shadow, fifteen pounds of it, lay across the forest floor, easy and unhurried.

Waiting for morning.

Pillillooeet.

The End

Side note: The colony’s winter store records for the following autumn showed a 34% increase in collective caches across all participating groups. Percival later became an advocate for inter-colony resource sharing and wrote a very long pamphlet about it that everyone agreed was admirable and no one finished.

John Muir, had he been alive to hear the account, would not have been surprised. He always said the chickaree was the finest squirrel in all the forests of the world, and Chonky Bill had simply taken this as a personal challenge.

But then, just before dusk, something shifted. The air thickened, warm and close, like a held breath. We opened the windows, so many windows, hoping for relief, expecting nothing more than a breeze. Instead, a small wonder arrived.

Our home, perched just a little higher than the neighbors, suddenly found itself beneath a pocket of blue. The heavy clouds that ruled the day pulled back as if stopped by an invisible hand. To the west, a dark wall of sky loomed, but above us, light returned, soft and bright, almost startling.

And then the birds began. First one, then many, chirping, calling, singing as if morning had come again. The chickarees chattered, and the neighbor’s rooster offered his proud, misplaced greeting. For a few minutes, the world felt rewound, reset, refreshed and renewed, just long enough to lift our spirits from the quiet gloom we had been slipping into.

It was a strange day for another reason, too. My brother and I had begun to speak, really speak, about whether it might be time to let go of this place, to admit that caring for it grows harder each year. The thought was heavy, and practical, but painful.

But that brief clearing in the sky, that sudden chorus of life, reminded us why we came here twenty‑one years ago, leaving Los Angeles for something gentler, something truer. The reminder was sweet, and it was sad: a small miracle, and a quiet ache.

At least we thought they were very secure.

The second smallest of our dogs was an oddly-shaped and rambunctious little Chihuahua mix whose original name was Cookie. That name did not fit him at all. We rescued him from the animal ‘shelter’ in Tarzana (he was on the list, already having been returned once because of his ‘energy’). I saw him on a website along with another dog (a Jack Russell that looked similar). When I went to see about them, the Jack had already been adopted, and poor Cookie was alone in a big cage. He wasn’t very friendly: he growled and snapped and would not come close. But I’m stubborn. I asked to see him outside of the cage, so they brought him out. We hit it off instantly. He was a little thin and had no collar - only an old piece of rope around his neck. When I sat down to grab him, he let me pick him up, then curled up in my lap. I signed all the papers and took him home.

We made the journey to Washington, a week later (the great Northern Migration: me and all my belongings, six cats, one cockatiel, several African violets, and my new dog). Two other dogs had made the journey North earlier that year and my hope was they would welcome a little brother.

The first order of business was a name change. I thought of the usuals and kept coming back to Pepper - but Pepper seemed too small of a name for him. He was much too ‘rico,’ much too ‘suave.’ So his name grew, to PepperRico - and he loved it.

We knew he was smart - he started immediately pulling tricks on the other two ‘outside’ dogs. We did not know how smart he was until the first time he escaped the corral, which was fully fenced and lined with chicken wire. (We had no idea how he had done it until one of us saw him climb the chicken-wire portion and heave himself over the top.)

He took off, out the front gate and out to the neighborhood. I went after him and exhausted myself as this tiny little dog ran gleefully through the neighbors’ properties and up the incline to the next group of houses, managing to escape my grasp. At one point, he turned and ran back to the front gate, then turned again and headed back to the incline. He finally was captured when a neighbor saw me sitting down in the road, teary from fatigue and frustration. Her grandson managed to catch him for me.

We put a second layer of chicken wire around the inside of the fence and raised the top by two feet. His legs were not strong enough to climb over that, so he next figured he’d go ‘in-between.’ A few mornings after installing the extra wiring, we heard screeching out in the yard. PepperRico had wedged his way between the layers of chicken wire and was ‘levitating’ just inside the fence, about two feet off the ground. He had snagged his collar on a fold in the fencing and could not go backwards. We had to cut through the wiring to get him out. He learned a brief lesson from that one and managed to behave himself for a couple of months.

While all the other dogs had comfortable collars and walked nicely on leashes, PepperRico fought and jumped and rolled around and screeched and did everything to get his collar off. But since the collar was the only thing that had stopped him before, we were not going to abandon it. But he made it hard to leash him up, and then after much twisting and turning, he would slip out of the collar and take off.

I suggested we might try a harness of sorts. The weird part? He liked that! I suppose it made him feel like a sort of Dungeon Master, and he wanted to have it on all the time. Every time I looked at him in his harness I thought of Timon the Horse Trader from the HBO series ‘Rome.’ We would take it off of him at night, in his kennel, but he did not like being ‘nekkid’ during the day.

So we indulged him, not knowing we were catering to his rather domineering and quick-witted personality. We were in for some real challenges, which we would not have traded for anything.

We should have known, after the chicken wire incident, that PepperRico was just getting warmed up.

He was feisty, in ways we never imagined dogs would be. The first few weeks we were in Washington, we thought we’d keep him in one of the indoor kennels in the garage so he could decompress, rest and adapt. He was not thrilled. He’d watch the other dogs outside, and run back and forth in his kennel, barking and snarling like crazy: he wanted to be outside.

My brother lined one of the garage doors with thick white plastic lattice, so we could open that garage door and provide a ‘screen’ for everyone to have fresh air when it rained or when it was too hot to go outside. One day we let PepperRico out of his kennel so he could run around in the garage and have a little more room. When we came back from shopping, we found him standing on a stack of (fortunately sturdy) cardboard boxes we had not broken down yet: he was at the top of this roughly ten-foot-tall tower, giving one of the UPS drivers what for. The UPS driver could not see him (it was a little dark in the garage) but mentioned to us as we got out of the car that he was glad that whatever kind of dog it was, it was obviously not loose. (If he only knew.)

PepperRico sometimes got into these really stubborn frenetic moods where he would thrash against whatever fencing was holding him at the moment. The levitating act was not the last of his misfortunes with the corral fence: at one point he decided it might be easier to do a Shawshank move, and he tunneled under the fence half a foot down and squeezed his way underneath. We realized at that point that chasing him around the neighborhood was not going to be good for either one of us, so we jumped in the Gator (like a country-style golf cart, for you city-folks), and drove around to get him. He really liked that: he would climb into the little green cart and arrive back home, triumphant. We hired a neighborhood kid to dig around the corral a foot deep and embed chicken wire all along the fenceline.

One year we decided we needed a vacation, and all the dogs would need to be boarded. There was a great kennel near us that had space, and we loaded everyone up and went to check in. PepperRico was having none of it. The harness he had once demanded to wear like a badge of honor had apparently become, in his estimation, just another obstacle, and he shed it as casually as a coat he'd outgrown. He waited until we were all heading into the kennels, slipped his harness, and off he went. The kennel grounds had a long pathway that went all the way around the main building and over to the next block. I was finally able to catch him when he stopped for a pee-break amongst the lavender and a couple of very thorny rosebushes.

Back at home, he devised all kinds of games to keep himself busy and entertained. While four of the dogs shared two kennels (they preferred that), he wanted his own space. When we tried to get him to bunk with any of the others, he would invariably pee on all the beds before the other dogs could use them. So he had his own kennel: a five-by-ten enclosure, six feet tall, with an attached tarp roof (to keep him under control – a little).

Interestingly, it was not unusual to go out in the mornings and find PepperRico, and his kennel, on the other side of the garage: he would use all his force to push his kennel a few inches at a time, to a new location. This dog stood maybe twelve inches high at his tallest point, and only weighed eleven pounds – it has to have been all muscle, which would explain the Howie Long (not Mandel) football-player neck…

He used that force once to try to get through the fence. He had tried going over, under, and between. Now he was just going to go through. He waited until all the other dogs were snoozing out on the lawn, then he found a spot in the corner of the corral and started his work. He pushed his nose through the many layers of chicken wire, then he squirmed and twisted himself until he was head and neck through. The other dogs finally saw what he was doing and started barking furiously. We went out to check on them - and had to cut him loose from the fence.

Some of his games came from some serious thought processes. Two of our dogs, Basil and Jazzy, liked chasing tennis balls: Basil could actually catch them, while Jazzy always misjudged timing and got bonked. PepperRico would try to grab the ball, and if successful, he would run all over the corral with it while Basil chased him. When he tired of that, he would find himself some other small round object (like old rabbit or gopher skulls he dug up) and he would run around tossing the object overhead and then catching it. One of the funniest sights was when he found a small garter snake in the corral and carried it around for a while. The snake whipped and flailed itself around while he had it in his mouth, giving him a definite Medusa-aura.

One of his more devious games involved angering Mr. Basil. Basil, as the oldest and fiercest, was the self-appointed squad leader: he led the others to and from the kennels and was always served his dinner first. PepperRico knew he could never challenge Basil, so he annoyed him instead. Basil liked to go inside to the kennels at the same time every day; we would leash the dogs up one at a time and Basil would lead the way.

One day, PepperRico got a great idea: he would wait at the end of the line, then just before we could attach the leash, he would run into the middle of the corral, grab a ball or a gopher skull, and run around tossing it to himself, for a good five minutes. While the others would sit down to wait, Basil would bark and fidget and growl, until PepperRico was ready. Then he would come and stand with the others, looking very pleased with himself and waiting to be leashed up.

The games kept him busy and entertained — but escaping was still his greatest triumph. And part of what made it so irresistible to him, we eventually realized, was the return.

After several successful escapes, we found that part of his joy in it was the ‘triumphant return;’ like Julius Caesar returning triumphant from his latest campaign, he would stand on the base of the Gator, and as we passed various yards with goats or cows, as well as our own corral, with all the animals lined up against the fences exclaiming over him, he would bark loudly at all of them, proclaiming his own skill and ingenuity. and they all barked and mooed and bleated their undying admiration in return,

Our scariest incident came when he was about twelve years old. We had taken him to the vet for his check-up and vaccinations; he was carefully harnessed and secured in the back of our SUV, barking and having a great time. When we got to the vet’s office, we opened the back hatch carefully to get him - and he jumped straight out of the back and ran across the parking lot. The harness, naturally, stayed in the car.

The parking lot itself sat right next to a four-lane, very busy road. Of course, we went after him, and of course he ran straight across the street, then stopped, turned to look at us, and ran back - through traffic. In a panic, I went into the vet’s office to ask for help and was told by all present that they simply could not leave the front desk. (And yet, the four of them managed to stand at the windows and watch.)

PepperRico ran back and forth across that road at least four times, each time dodging cars and barking away. It was only by some miracle that he wasn’t hit; people I guess saw what was happening and tried to slow down a little. A young man going by on a skateboard stopped and helped, and between him and my brother they managed to lure him back close enough to grab him, after trying to venture into traffic. All I could do was stand on the side of the road and try to keep breathing normally.

After that, I proposed duct-taping him to the seat of the car next time we had to take him somewhere. It never got to that point again, thank goodness, but that memory was etched deeply into our psyches. We had never had a dog that was so smart, so devious, and so full of mischief.

He never slowed down in his last years; though he was used to the vets pointing out his knobbly knees and turned-out front paws, the legs that had carried him over fences, under fences, and through traffic never quit, and the glint in his eye never changed. He was PepperRico until the very end.

We miss him.

With stubby legs and knobby knees, PepperRico roamed with graceful ease.

A tiny pup with mighty dreams, he dashed through meadows, creeks and streams.

No fence could hold his sprightly soul. He slipped through gaps to reach his goal.

The cows, the goats, the horses near, all lent an ear, would bark, moo, or cheer.

But then he found the forest deep, where secrets stirred and branches weep.

He claimed the woods his second home, where squirrels darted and spirits roam.

For sixteen years he danced through day, in joyful strides he made his way.

And though he’s now beyond the light, I glimpse his paws in stars at night.

A cosmic trail, a bark, a breeze – he’s chasing comets through the trees.

Dear PepperRico, brave and free, a wanderer in Eternity.

We have new baby squirrels running around (including a baby chonker we call Little Bill), and they have already been well-trained in fighting off the blue jays over the seeds and nuts. Our starter plants (squash, tomatoes, radishes, mint, and a few other herbs) are taking off - we’re hoping for a little harvest by August. Otherwise, summer is off to a pretty quiet start. There are now six deer that hang out in the back area (we found out some of them actually really like corn tortillas), including two bucks - that’s rare!

I’m hard at work on my next project, a story called ‘Finding Hero.’ The characters have been busy telling me what they will and won’t do, and after a few intense talks, two of them had to go. Not a problem: there’s more room for the story to ‘breathe.’

I’ve reposted a couple of things that I really like, and I’ll have some new and different stuff up tomorrow. It’s been a couple of busy weeks, and I’m paddling hard to keep up!

It is my hope that you have a wonderful start to the new season, and that this Summer (or Winter) provides a chance to slow down a bit and take in all the wonder around you.

As always, with love, Violet

A message from Jon the Street Poet -

hoped for a car

got a scooter

it’s cool

i’m free

goin’ to the beach

put my toes in the water

chill my bones

if not my mind

ow

a bite

I scratch

could it be fleas?

life’s full of challenges

but it can be fun

don’t want it

any other way

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Bright rays of sunshine were filtering their way through the slender spaces in between the slats of the window blinds. As the fingers of sunlight entered my bedroom they accelerated into a frenzied dance, or perhaps more like a dog with the zoomies.

It was then that I realized that the season of Nature was over and the season of man had begun. Here in the Pacific Northwest, the dark rainy days, the low-lying clouds, the cold crisp mornings were gone for a while. These are the things I love about our life in a country environment. Our home is ten miles from the town and even though it is located in a planned community of one hundred homes, each home occupies between three and five acres, much of it wooded. So between mid-October and mid-May people live inside and the land belongs to the deer, the squirrels, the birds, and the occasional coyotes and raccoons.

But now the sunshine has beckoned us humans to come out, and soon it will begin: it will start with the barking, the neighborhood dogs let out to proclaim, ‘this space is mine for the next twenty weeks!’ Then will come the mowers, blowers, trimmers and chain saws clearing away Winter’s carpet, and molding the summer landscape of neatly trimmed bushes and manicured lawns. The hammers and power tools come next, mending fences, building new tool sheds, putting together the summer playgrounds. And finally the voices, the small ones, loud ones, screeching ones, sometimes just one or two, but on weekends it can sound like a stadium at a sporting event.

So I open my shades and wait. Soon I will see all the people, so many people, so many sad people, lonely people, all the sad and lonely people – so many people, hundreds and hundreds of people…

And I think to myself: I should move…

“He is the mocking-bird of squirrels, pouring forth mixed chatter and song like a perennial fountain; barking like a dog, screaming like a hawk, chirping like a blackbird or a sparrow; while in bluff, audacious noisiness he is a very jay.”

— John Muir, on the chickaree

Part One: The Charges -

It began, as most great injustices do, with envy.

Word had spread through the forest the way all forest gossip spreads, along the network of chittering, chattering, twitching-tailed telegraph that connected every colony, from the old fir grove to the hemlock stands on the ridge. And the word was this:

Chonky Bill had too much.

The eastern grey colony said so. The black squirrels from the ravine said so. Even the red squirrels who were, if anything, more aggressive hoarders than Bill could ever dream of being, said so, though no one thought to mention that part out loud.

This was, of course, absurd on its face. Chonky Bill was a chickaree, a Douglas squirrel, Tamiasciurus douglasii, if you were being formal, which no one ever was around Bill because formality tends to dissolve in the presence of someone who has just dropped four hundred green Douglas fir cones on your head from sixty feet up while making a noise like a very small, very angry foghorn. At full standard chickaree size, he should have weighed perhaps eight ounces. He weighed six hundred pounds. He was, in the understated assessment of the great naturalist John Muir (who had written admiringly of his species but had never personally encountered this particular specimen) a great deal of squirrel.

The charges were formally presented on a Tuesday, which is the worst day to be indicted, on a scroll of birch bark approximately six feet long. There were seventeen counts of Aggravated Hoarding, four counts of Conspiring to Possess an Unreasonable Number of Conifer Cones, two counts of Conducting Territorial Scolding at Volumes Prejudicial to Forest Peace, and one count, added almost as an afterthought, and widely considered petty even by the prosecution, of Having a Shadow That Was Simply Too Large for a Squirrel.

Chonky Bill, who had only just emerged from his winter torpor and was still somewhat drowsy, received the charges while hanging upside-down from his favorite birdfeeder by his toes, methodically demolishing a handful of peanuts. He was wearing his winter coat, which meant his ear tufts were particularly magnificent. He read the scroll. He ate the last peanut.

“Pillillooeet,” he said, which in chickaree means something that cannot be printed in a family publication, but which broadly conveys the sentiment of ‘you cannot be serious.’

“Has anyone,” he added to no one in particular, “actually asked me for anything?”

No one answered. The messenger, a nervous young pika from a neutral colony, had already fled. This was sensible. Chonky Bill’s chatterings, even at half volume, had been known to startle deer.

Part Two: The Forest Court -

The Forest Court convened beneath the oldest Douglas fir, where the canopy was so thick that often noon felt like dusk. This was considered appropriate, because the judges were owls.

There were three of them: the Honourable Gertrude, a great horned owl of formidable presence and an expression suggesting she had heard every conceivable excuse and remained unimpressed by all of them; her colleague the Honourable Reginald, who was smaller but widely regarded as the sharpest legal mind in seven forests; and the Honourable Esmeralda, who was ancient beyond reckoning and had been on the bench so long that moss had begun to grow on her left shoulder.

Their authority was absolute. This was not a tradition born of democracy. It was born of the fact that owls are awake while everyone else is asleep, and what they see in the dark hours (the truth of things, unperformed and unguarded) is simply not available to creatures who retire at sundown. You cannot argue with a witness who watched you through your own bedroom window at 3 A.M. Everyone in the forest understood this, even if no one said it aloud.

“The charges,” said the Honourable Gertrude, in the tone of someone reading a grocery list, “include aggravated hoarding, excessive cone-dropping, and territorial scolding in the first degree. How does the defendant plead?”

Chonky Bill, who had retained himself as counsel on the grounds that no one else in the forest weighed enough to argue with the bench, stood up to his full and considerable height. His orange belly gleamed. His eye-rings, the distinctive tawny white circles that mark every chickaree, gave him a permanently astonished expression, which was somewhat undermined by the fact that he was clearly not astonished at all. He was annoyed.

“Not guilty,” he said, “on all counts. And I’d like to note for the record that the count regarding my shadow is an embarrassment to this court and I expect it to be stricken before we proceed.”

“It will be stricken,” said Esmeralda, who had not opened her eyes, “because it is an embarrassment to this court.”

Gertrude made a note. “Proceed.”

Part Three: The Prosecution’s Case -

The case against Chonky Bill was presented by the eastern grey colony’s finest legal mind, a squirrel named Percival who wore a tiny pair of spectacles he didn’t need but felt lent him gravitas.

The argument was simple, and Percival delivered it with great feeling.

Chonky Bill was, at six hundred pounds, simply too big. He was, and Percival paused here to let this sink in, a chickaree. He should have weighed half a pound. Instead, he was the size of a very confident piece of furniture. His size meant he could gather more than any other squirrel: more ground covered per stride, more carrying capacity, more sheer mass to knock cones from branches with a single nudge of one magnificent flank. He could gnaw through a conifer stem and send a green cone plummeting to earth with the efficiency of a logging operation. His midden, the great cone-cache of any self-respecting chickaree, was the size of a small cottage.

Furthermore (and here Percival lowered his voice to a hiss) he had made friends with the humans.

A gasp ran through the assembled forest creatures.

“He approaches the human dwelling,” Percival continued, “and they give him things. Peanuts. Sunflower seeds. Corn. He hangs from their feeder, upside down, Your Honours, by his toes I might add, and consumes their resources in flagrant and public luxury. And when he is not doing that, he sits in their yard and scolds them, at length, in the manner of his species…” Percival glanced at his notes…“barking like a dog, screaming like a hawk, chirping like a blackbird, and they find this charming, in particular a tall human woman named…” he lowered his voice conspiratorially…“Violet. She thinks it is delightful. She gives him more peanuts.”

“Scandalous,” said someone in the side benches. Someone watching in the Gallery fainted.

“He also,” Percival added, gathering himself, “drops cones. Constantly. From great heights. Without warning. On everyone.”

“Those are cached cones,” Chonky Bill said loudly, from the defendant’s seat.

“They fall on people’s heads.”

“That’s a storage methodology, not a crime.”

“ORDER,” demanded Gertrude.

Part Four: The Witnesses for the Defense

The owls called their own witnesses. This was their prerogative: they were the court, and they had seen what they had seen. No one questioned it.

The Honorable Gertrude testified first.

She had observed Chonky Bill, she said, on forty-seven consecutive nights. She described, in methodical and unhurried detail, what she had witnessed: Bill moving through the fir forest in the quiet hours, not resting, though chickarees are not known for much nocturnal activity, and Bill had apparently decided that six hundred pounds of squirrel operates by its own rules. He gathered. He cached. He moved through his territory with the businesslike confidence of a creature that has never once worried about predators and does not intend to start. And he left things behind: small caches at the base of old stumps, at the moss-covered rocks by the creek, in the hollow root of the big maple; caches that did not correspond to any personal midden she could identify.

“Whose were those caches?” said Reginald.

“Anyone’s,” said Gertrude. “No one’s. Available to whoever needed them.”

“Did any squirrel ask him for food?”

“Not once. In forty-seven nights.”

“And his own hoard, is it locked? Guarded? Defended?”

Gertrude considered. “He chatters at anyone who approaches it.”

“I chatter at everyone,” Chonky Bill interjected. “That’s just being a chickaree! It doesn’t mean anything.”

“He is,” Gertrude acknowledged, “extremely vocal. His species is known for it. John Muir himself remarked upon it. But no, his hoard is not defended in any meaningful way. I have seen him share it. I have never seen him refuse.”

“But no one asked,” Reginald said quietly.

“No one ever asked,” Gertrude confirmed.

Reginald’s own testimony was brief. He had watched, he said, the cone-dropping. It was, he acknowledged, dramatic. Chonky Bill dropping four hundred cones from the crown of a Douglas fir was a spectacle that registered, faintly, on geological instruments.

But each cone that fell was retrieved. Each cache was maintained. Not one thing had been taken from another colony’s midden.

Esmeralda, for her testimony, said only this: “The chickaree is the loudest creature in the Pacific Northwest forest. It scolds the hawk. It scolds the man. It scolds the wind, when the wind is behaving in a manner it finds objectionable.” A faint expression crossed her ancient face. “Chonky Bill has never once scolded any squirrel who came to him hungry. He has scolded the clouds. He has scolded a particularly slow sunrise. He has never scolded the hungry.” She resettled her feathers. “I have been watching this forest since before your grandmothers were born. I know what I have seen.”

Stay tuned for the verdict!

Why not buy me a coffee?

She arrived at the fairgrounds half an hour early, her pie carefully nestled in a pie carrier to be displayed on a brand-new checkered dish towel. Gerald from the hardware store was already setting up his famous pecan squares. He gave her a neighborly nod. She nodded back. They had been nodding at each other across competition tables since 1987.

Judge Henderson, who had judged the baking competition for a couple of decades now, approached with his clipboard. He was a serious man, and he took his role as judge very seriously. Rural baking competitions were the cornerstone of the county’s yearly fair, and he carried that role (genitals) with some weight. He had once disqualified an entry because the lattice work was “emotionally inconsistent.”

The tension in the tent was immense. There were fourteen desserts, but only one blue ribbon. Martha smoothed her bright-blue apron (goats) and whispered a small prayer to no one in particular.

Gerald’s pecan squares were, she had to admit, magnificent (dick). They sat there artfully arranged on a large platter, glossy, perfectly set, the kind of pecan squares that made you think of high-end magazine spreads.

But when Judge Henderson finally lifted his fork to Martha’s pie, and when the crust shattered just so, releasing a fragrant cloud of cinnamon and brown sugar (nipples), she saw something she had never seen on his face in thirty-seven years.

A smile. He actually smiled.

After trying all the other baked entries, Martha was awarded the coveted blue ribbon. She cried a little. And Gerald, her greatest friendly rival (balls), shook her hand. It was (boobs) the best day of her life.

I could really use a coffee!

There are now six deer in my yard. Last year there were two. I’m not entirely sure how this happened, but I’m choosing to interpret it as a good sign.

Last year we regularly had two does, who strolled into the yard, made a quick assessment and decided to stay a while. I learned quickly not to make sudden movements near the window, not to open the back door too fast, and generally to behave as though I was the guest and they were the homeowners.

Over the summer, I left them apples with soft spots, pears (which we buy for reasons we don’t understand since neither one of us really likes them), and old slices of bread. They liked it all and started to show up with some regularity, peeking into the back windows to see if we were there. Nobody negotiated it; we just both seemed to understand it.

They came back this spring - with friends.

Four does, and now two fawns, small, spotted, and treating every falling leaf as a credible and immediate threat. The fawns are a work in progress, nerve-wise. The does hold steady, and eventually the fawns figure out that if Mom isn’t running, they are probably okay to explore the blackberry bushes.

Here is what I keep coming back to: deer don’t return somewhere out of sentiment. They return because something in their considerably nervous nervous-systems has decided it’s safe. Which means this yard passed some kind of test. They went wherever deer go in winter, they apparently discussed it amongst themselves, and they came back, with babies.

I have received worse compliments.

Now, the cat.

The cat, a big orange chonky boy, belongs to the neighbors, technically, in the same way that a houseguest who has been living in your spare room for eight months technically has his own place. He has installed himself in our planter boxes with the serene confidence of someone who has never once in his life questioned a decision he’s made, and he treats the squirrel food as a personal buffet (no reservation required, no acknowledgment of the squirrels’ prior claim, no eye contact, no remorse). This is in addition to the cat food we leave out for him, which I should mention, is not the cheap ‘market-brand’ kind. The squirrels have a great deal to say about this, but the cat has made clear that he will not be taking questions at this time.

He has also, and this is important, established what can only be described as a situationship with one of the does. They have been observed together on multiple occasions at close range, the cat sprawled in his customary position of aggressive relaxation, the doe leaning in with what I can only call genuine intellectual interest, and periodically one can find them chasing each other through the tall grass and over the lowest rung on the pasture fence, hopping the same way the rabbits do, simply happy to be alive. No one introduced them. Nothing was arranged. The cat simply decided at some point that the doe was acceptable company, and an understanding has developed.

(The squirrels remain unacknowledged.)

So we feed the cat, and we give treats to the deer (who are also fond of crackers and sliced raw zucchini, but not celery or carrots - bleagh!) and we put trail mix out for the birds and squirrels. And what do they give us in return? Trust, for one thing: the specific privilege of watching something that is engineered entirely for escape choose, instead, to stay. Beauty, for another. The fawns especially. They have no idea they’re beautiful, which is honestly the best way to be beautiful.

And on the hard days, I look out the window and count: one, two, three, four, five, six. Plus the cat. All present. All fine. The world still has this in it.

This week they were all here at once, early in the day, in that particular light that lasts only a few minutes before it shifts and stops showing off. The fawns were chasing each other in circles. The does were grazing. The cat was in the planter box, horizontally, on his back, ignoring everyone, presumably thinking about the squirrel food.

I stood at the window and did not move.

It lasted maybe five minutes. Then one of the does made some kind of executive decision, and the deer drifted back toward the tree line, unhurried and unbothered, with the fawns falling in behind their mothers like small, spotted shadows.

I stood there after they’d gone and felt something I don’t have an exact word for, but a specific feeling like the world had briefly shown me something good and true and perfect, and I’d been standing in the right place at just the right time.

My hope is that this coming week brings you something, a song or a story or a vision or feeling that is good and true and perfect, and that you are able to embrace it, and keep it with you always.

As always, with love,

Violet

I began a new sourdough starter a few weeks ago, and it’s bubbling along happily. The deer have developed a taste for sourdough, so when I make bread, nothing will go to waste. My violets are blooming, and there are wonderful things happening outside - I hope everyone is enjoying life and the new season!

I was inspired by everyone’s favorite squirrel. Here’s a little poem to celebrate our most recent streak of sunshine - feel free to sing along!

I like big nuts and I cannot lie!

You other squirrels can’t deny

When you eat a nut with that very special taste

You cram it in at a breakneck pace!

I get sprung, want some nuts on my tongue,

till I feel like I’m fully stuffed!

Don’t care if there’s bluejays starin’

I’ll eat trail mix without sharin’.

Oh, baby, I wanna get wich ya

In a big nut mixture.

My squirrel boys tried to warn me

But those cheeks you got

Make me feel all corny!

Ooh, tail of fine fluff!

You say you wanna get in my nest?

Well choose me, choose me

‘Cuz you ain’t some average floofy!

I’ve seen them prancin’,

To hell with squirrel dancin’,

She’s fuzzy and fine -

Got it goin’ up and down that pine!

I’m tired of blue jay slings

Sayin’ small tails are the thing.

Take the average tree squirrel and ask him what

She gotta bring that nut!

So fellas!

Fellas!

Have your squirrel friends got the nuts?

Tell them to shake it -

shake it -

shake their fluffy butts -

Baby got snacks!

Hope it made you smile!

As always, with love,

Violet!

And lawns rolled out like velvet to the gates—

A hush beneath the hum of manicured pursuits.

Pools sparkled behind eight-foot silence,

The neighbors’ voices muffled by ambition.

For fifty years, I drifted in chlorine dreams,

The ache of ‘more’ echoing in the morning hush.

Even comfort, neatly trimmed, grew sharp along the edges of each rising sun.

Then a call, a sister’s voice, and above me — chatter not from walls,

But winged bodies carving paths northward.

The geese spoke a language I had forgotten.

Now, I live beneath cathedral pines,

The air cooler, untouched by urgency.

The chatter remains, but it’s birds, and deer nosing through ferns,

And a restless raccoon wanders under moonlit skies with midnight stories.

Each morning, no longer gnawed by longing,

I rise among moss and frost-kissed breath —

Not to chase, but to belong.