3 weeks Ago By By Daniel Neman St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Squirrels are cute and furry and absolutely adorable. But my wife calls them “little turds.” Actually, my wife is a former newspaperwoman and she does not use as mild a word as “turds,” but it is as close as I can get in a family newspaper.
Our neighborhood squirrels dig up the dirt of all of our potted plants. They slurp up the sugar water from our hummingbird feeder. They eat our tomatoes and leave the half-chewed tomato carcasses on our deck to torment us.
They ate so many of our tomatoes that we actually stopped growing them. So now they take our neighbors’ tomatoes and bring them to our house where they leave the half-chewed tomato carcasses on our deck. That’s annoying, but also kind of funny.
Then again, I’m not the one who does the gardening, so I don’t take it personally. To my mind, squirrels are still cute and furry and adorable until they do something to antagonize me. Which they just did.
Living nearly half of my life in the South has left me with a deep and abiding thirst for iced tea. I drink it daily, in quantities large enough to drown a squirrel. Which, come to think of it, isn’t a bad idea.
In the summer, I make sun tea . It’s impossibly smooth, with none of the tannins that bring a bitter edge to iced tea. And it’s easy to make.
Simply fill a glass pitcher or bottle or even bowl with cold water, and add teabags. All you have to do is cover the glass pitcher or the bottle or the bowl and set it outside in the summer sun for 21⁄2 to 4 hours, depending on how bright and hot it is. It’s the covering part that got me into trouble.
We have two large glass pitchers and one half-gallon glass milk bottle from a Rochester, New York, dairy in the 1970s. When I use the milk bottle to make sun tea, I just cover it with an ordinary screw-on lid. But pitchers don’t have lids, so when I use one of them I simply cover it with a piece of plastic wrap.
The clear plastic only allows more of the sun’s rays to warm the tea. I’ve done it this way for as long as I’ve been making sun tea, without a single problem. Until now.
A squirrel apparently became curious about this pitcher of water that slowly becomes darker over time. So it tore through the cling wrap, removed the teabags from the tea and placed them next to the pitcher. Then it drank some of the tea and ripped open one of the teabags, presumably to eat the leaves inside.
I threw out the remaining tea and thoroughly washed out the pitcher. Very thoroughly. You never know what diseases the squirrel had, so I naturally assume it had rabies.
I have no reason to suspect that curiosity killed the squirrel. But I took a certain perverse pleasure in thinking that a hyper-caffeinated squirrel was frantically running around the neighborhood like a pinball and not sleeping for a week. I was unhappy because I did not have tea for the next day.
But I was content in the knowledge that the squirrel had learned its lesson and would obviously never do it again. Obviously, it did it again, and just a few days later. As I threw out the tea again, I thought about the things I could do to take revenge on the rapacious rodents.
But I only ended up vowing to make my sun tea in the milk bottle with the screw-on lid. And for the first time in my life, I started to hate squirrels. They’re little turds.
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