Patience and a squirrel
Patience is a gift...
Patience my friend, patience
Patience is a virtue
Just think about or try to envision one of those frosty mornings and you're sittin' agin (Kentucky talk) a big oak tree. Right in between two big roots that make a leaf and loam filled natural chair of sorts. The canvas jacket you're wearing hasn't been washed in years. You don't wash a hunting jacket you see because it might give off a scent...a scent an animal could smell. The feel of that heavy canvas and the smell of years or woodland wear and tear is something of the inner soul. Something you couldn't describe for there are no words for things such as this experience.
The sun is just rising and in the silence of the morning you hear it, a brush of leaves...subtle, but he's there. Like a big airy broom, a medium sized branch festooned with mid fall leaves and nuts has just swished across another. But there is no breeze on this chilly morning, no reason that should have happened. No reason save for one. A big red squirrel is working the nearby oak, a smaller one, but all the cuttings scattered around tell you that that big ole boy is heading your way.
The 12 gage you're holding was your daddy's side by side and you can smell the metal and feel the memories it holds
With me so far?? Hang in there...
Your dad and you sat in this very same spot when you were only 8 years old and you remember seeing the sunlight of that long ago morning shining right through a gray squirrel's tail. It made a different light, almost a reflection, no perhaps a glint, but it was different, and for some unknown reason, everything about that time, that place, burned into your memory. The experience of that moment got in so deep that in the worst of times you would somehow drift back to this day and the memory would bring a inner smile, and provide a comfort. Does God himself give us such memories?
You think about it from time to time since he passed, and the thought always brings you right back to that exact same moment. And over the many long and eventful years, that one constant remains. One chilly morning, one oak tree and a dad and a gun.
That squirrel is moving and getting noisier. He must feel there are no predators around because he is now just stuffing on the acorns. You can hear the bits of chewed acorn shells hitting the ground and one just nips a blade of grass about 75 feet away. You think that it's amazing how acute your senses have become that you actually saw that, and you now know exactly where that guy is in the adjacent tree.
You consider standing slowly and moving over to get a good shot. You have one barrel full choke, the second trigger, and one modified. Both have some high-brass #6 chambered, so even right here, at this distance, you just might be able to connect, but he's way up in this 80 foot tree now and covered by a tangle of lower branches. But if you stand you'll ruin the moment. Dad didn't stand. He just waited. And as if led by a God driven magnet, that big gray from long ago came ever closer and closer. I remember the excitement as I anticipated the shot. My dad, the WW2 bomber pilot with his trusty Stevens 12 gage. Oh that coveted gun, with it's mid twentieth century mix of steel and checkered wood that now rests in a large walnut gun case just 6 feet away. It's lost some of it's luster, but the memories it makes causes that thing to be some sort of psychological emotion generator, it has a power all it's own. I have seen the magic of that shotgun pour out on my sons. I have witnessed how their facial expressions changed as they shouldered the thing and sighted down a barrel that their father and grand father looked across in decades past.
No to stalk that squirrel would be wrong. He will come, he will line up and I will get that shot. And he will drop just a few feet from me and know what? I won't rush over to pick up the catch. No, I'll just sit patiently while the last echo of the shot and the thump from the eighty odd foot fall fades and silence of a woodland morning returns like waves washing a sand castle flat. I'll savor the smell as I slowly break open and eject the still warm spent shell and load another.
There are other squirrels out by now and their memory is short. And I have a commanding view over the largest oak in the area above me. No there will be more, several if I'm lucky. And all the while the mist is settling in like a magical healing machine enveloping me and everything around. Filling my soul with it's musty aroma that pins me forever to this spot and place.
While thinking of this morning and that early frosty morning of my boyhood, I hear it...a bit distant, but another branch just moved...
Patience, yes patience, is really a gift my friend
