oooaaaaeeeaaarrgh!

We killed all the grass in our front yard. We did it on purpose, to make the ground more amenable to wild flowers. (Death to the discarded, life to the cultivated. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, a penny in the diaper.) I enlisted autumn leaves into my campaign to bring suffocating death to the plant life occupying what is officially my land. I raked them into heaps around my yard but it wasn’t enough so I gathered them from the gutter in the front of my house and across the street, carrying them by the armload over to my yard and mounding them up to ankle height.

Amid one of these gatherings I managed to grab a dead squirrel that had been laying in the gutter beneath all the leaves. I gave some mix of scream and grunt and howl. Something like “oooaaaaeeeaaarrgh!” I dropped the armload of leaves and went back across the street and into my house, spluttering the whole time. I scrubbed and scrubbed my hand under the hot water, trying to stop thinking about how many leaves had been sitting on that dead thing, leaves I’d held to my chest, near my face. I felt myself quite restrained that I didn’t curse as I explained to my children what had happened.

I thought of this squirrel today as I considered trying to write a commentary on the actions of a billionaire or a politician or someone else of that ilk, and thought it might make a metaphor of some sort - the squirrel the empathy and conscience of the plutocrats, or maybe the temptation to comment on current events as if my little notebook matters, as if my loathing is insight, or maybe it’s the most obvious outrages that distract us from the ongoing slow smothering. I couldn’t make it work though to be fair I barely tried. Most of my response to the world is summed up in “oooaaaaeeeaaarrgh!” Mostly I just want to wash my hands.