The white squirrel
Here is the fiction story I will not write. It is about a neighborhood in which there are many gray squirrels, a few red squirrels and black squirrels, and just one spectacular white squirrel.
In this story, the residents of the neighborhood are deep in discussion and worry, for the white squirrel is so different, and so startling, that no one understands it. They feel it is foreign and does not belong. While the white squirrel is beautiful in the sunlight, and it moves and behaves like any other squirrel, its very existence causes the residents of this neighborhood a restive, penetrating concern. Some of them lie awake in the night, fretting that the white squirrel represents something they have yet to grasp - sudden unpreventable change, perhaps - while others fear this ghostly white being is an angel of death. One ancient crone swears the last time the white squirrel was seen in this area was just before her dear husband fell ill, and in days he was gone.
Okay, I am making all that up as I type. I really hadn't fully decided what the story was going to be about. Stories come to me every day. I write some, and I brew about others, to see if they really want to take shape. But the day I saw the white squirrel for the first time, my imagination was piqued. What might the white squirrel represent, and what interesting metaphor would resonate for readers in this challenging time of intolerance in our world history?
And then.
And then a boy died. A little boy, no more than 5. He was a little sprite, funny and fast and blond and cute. I would see him jumping on the trampoline in my neighbor's backyard, which borders my own. If not for the fence between us, my dog would be running right on over there to romp and play too. See. We were neighbors. He would have started Kindergarten Tuesday, except that he died on Monday.
I cannot even speak of how he died, except that it was by his own mother's hand - the elsewhere parent who hard part time custody. One week ago today, this sweet cherub passed from this earth, his soul sent aloft to fly, and he is now on some escapade, I imagine, like a wild rumpus with the creatures of Where the Wild Things Are. If tears were productive, I would be so rich.
And now I see the white squirrel every day.
For days now, it has been in my yard or one of my neighbors' yards each time I glance out the window in any direction. It scampered through my yard this morning and I swear took a glance at me, and giggling, was then off to a new adventure. The white squirrel is not just a metaphorical thing. It is happiness and daylight, mystery and unknowing, fear and fantasy and endless questioning, unleashed by all the things in the universe we simply can't understand.
Image credits:
Image 1: https://www.mvmag.net/2016/09/18/white-squirrels/
Image 2: Photo by AimeeLow at Morguefile.com
Image 3: http://www.inside.iastate.edu/article/2016/07/14/squirrels