Will I be single forever? I dunno.

Also, a baby squirrel dies on my watch : (

Last week, as I was driving along a busy two-lane road near my home, I spotted a deer sprinting parallel to me along the narrow stretch of ground between the shoulder and a wire fence. 

It’s a prettyish road, with overhanging tree branches and glimpses of forest, but it’s constantly abuzz with the motorized trappings of suburbia - SUVs and lawn care trailers and BMWs being driven by speeding teens. 

For a few seconds, I watched that deer bounding and bounding until the speed of traffic forced me to leave it behind, and as I rounded the curve that took it out of my view, fear squeezed my heart. How in the world would that deer survive? 

Writers are prone to exaggeration, so while my sighting of the deer is real, it’s likely hyperbole that I saw the desperation in its eyes. But what is also real is the fear I felt. I’m forever both amazed and disheartened that wild creatures adapt to the environments us humans have thrust upon them. Did the deer know some shortcut to get around the fence and into some small patch of woods? Could she sense the need to stay away from speeding vehicles? Does she nibble at the grass soaked in pesticide and not get sick? 

Photo by Jeffrey Hamilton on Unsplash

Obviously, deer acclimate to their surroundings. And so do we. I’ve been single for nearly four years now, and I’m used to not sharing a bathroom with a man (YAY). I no longer have to worry about how the Red Sox are doing (WHO CARES). I’m the only one loading the dishwasher, but at least now it’s always done correctly. 

Getting accustomed to other aspects of being divorced is more difficult. I’m okay being single today, and even tomorrow and next week and next month. But next year? The next decade? For the rest of my life? That’s harder to reconcile when I ponder my future. I can live without a life partner. Lots of people do. I can adapt. But do I want to? I have no fear of being alone. But the fear of loneliness sometimes paralyzes me. 

A few days before I saw the deer, I went into my outdoor shower as usual one night, and saw a huge patch of Spanish moss on the ground beneath the shower head. There’s a large oak branch above the area; it obviously had fallen from there. So I picked up the moss and tossed it over the shower wall, then turned on the water. As the water sprayed forth, I heard a series of high-pitched squeaks - and I looked down to find the tiniest of tiny gray long-tailed baby animals I could imagine, its eyes closed, white belly exposed, squealing away. It had little rounded ears the size of fingernails and pink paws tipped with long black nails. Its body heaved with the effort of breathing. A baby rat? I wondered. We later determined it was a squirrel.

I picked up the baby gently with a towel and called my daughter, and she held it while we cooed over it and watched it squirm and settle, squirm again and resettle. It was smaller than the palm of her hand.

It had been in the moss, I determined - there must have been a squirrel’s nest in the moss, and it had fallen during some recent strong winds. 

“What should we do?” my daughter asked. 

“Well,” I said. “I guess I’ll tuck it back into the moss and hope its mother finds it.” In my heart, I knew this was a death sentence. I thought briefly about making it comfortable in a shoebox and then bringing it to a wildlife sanctuary. It seemed like a lot of trouble. 

So I tucked it into the moss in a way I hoped would keep it warm, shooed the dogs away, and went to sleep. 

The next morning, as I was making coffee, I heard my daughter screaming. I ran into her room as she began shouting, “Cookie killed it! Cookie killed it!” Little 10-pound Cookie the dog had the limp baby squirrel gently in her mouth. She must have snagged it when I let them out that morning - I think she thought it was a toy.

“No, honey,” I said. “Cookie didn’t kill it. I’m pretty sure it died overnight.”

My daughter has stuck to the Cookie-is-a-murderer narrative, and I kind of wish I could buy into as well, because I know I killed that baby as surely as if I had smothered it. It was too weak to adapt to its new surroundings, the new and strange environs in which it had been unexpectedly placed. It died alone and scared and probably cold. I can’t stop thinking of that. 

I know I won’t die alone and scared and goddamn I hope I’m not cold because I hate being cold. For the love of St. Joseph, patron saint of happy deaths, someone please make sure I’m wearing fuzzy socks when I’m dying. 

Adapting to a new vision of my future is difficult and occasionally dispiriting. But the world is full of the strange and wonderful, and I know that as long as I have the ability to explore, I can be reasonably content. Still, I wonder if one day someone will understand the way I see the universe, and think to himself, I could adapt to that.