pinky, we hardly knew ye

Not the exact same baby squirrel I found at Jamaica Pond yesterday, but the spitting image of him. Even down to the nubbly white washrag he's lying on. Too bad he didn't make it; I guess walking around outdoors can't always be baby ducks and healthy hawks. I can't seem to get him off my mind, though. It's funny; I lost two clients this year, but the predictable (though certainly unfortunate) death of a newborn squirrel is the one that has made me feel the grimmest. Something about the tiny helplessness of it, breathing its last breath in the palm of my hand, has stirred a sadness in me that I can't distance myself from like I can the others. Or, more likely, the relative lack of investment I had in him compared to my human charges has conjured a grief in a manageable size, whereas the other two are just too big, too scary, and too sad for me to feel as viscerally as this. Anyway, I don't think I'll be walking around Jamaica Pond for a while. At least until I feel a little less raw about the whole thing.

long drought

It seems like a really long time since I've posted anything here, and I guess it has been. I feel like I've gone from 0 to 60 in the past month - all more or less good - but have had little mental energy (or time) left for blogging. Or rather, for coming up with coherent sentences in long enough strings to be worth blogging.

To be honest, I'm considering putting the whole blog down for an extended hiatus - more on this soon when I have the aforementioned resources to handle it with the level of thought and writing quality I think it deserves.

In the meantime, to all my faithful readers (about four) and sometime-visitors: sorry for the long silence, and for the wishy-washy nature of tonight's re-entry. I'll do my best to have something more definitive here in the next few days.