Quarantine: The Chipmunk 911

 During the first few months of the quarantine last spring, my office was the kitchen.  My work laptop was set up on the kitchen table each morning, and dismantled at night, our much-magneted refrigerator featured prominently in zoom meetings, and I could chat to myself while getting a drink of water at our kitchen sink.  Back then we were novices at the whole virtual school bit, so we had Owen set up at the computer upstairs, not realizing yet that if he were to pay any attention whatsoever we had to be monitoring him like a hawk.  Instead I sat at the afore-mentioned kitchen table and enjoyed watching the birds – and occasional hawk – out the kitchen window.

I’ve long fed the birds and squirrels in our back yard daily, but now I had the opportunity to watch all the activity around the birdfeeder.  It was definitely a perk of quarantine!  I got to observe my favorite titmice and red-bellied woodpeckers, and I became particularly fond of a chipmunk who lived under our porch, and made a little running trail from the porch corner to the shed corner and over to the feeder.  From April through June I’d watch the little guy peek out from his den and scamper to the shed, resting on the stone steps and enjoying what we called his patio, a wooden upright stake that he’d perch on before returning full-cheeked back from the feeder.

 

Occasionally I’d put some fruit or seeds out on an unused old picnic table we inherited from the previous owners, and he would easily climb up and enjoy a raspberry.  (So too, I was surprised to see, did our resident yard woodchuck, who I would have thought was too portly to climb onto a table.  She was not.)  I was very fond of the chipmunk, and felt he was my quarantine buddy.

 

Guess who else liked to observe the bird/chipmunk activity in our yard?  The cats from up the street.  Whenever we’d see a cat, I’d call out and Owen would come whooping down the stairs and Maple would come howling from her bed and we’d all go and chase the cats away with noise and motion and raised fists.  Until one day, when a tabby got smart and approached the feeder from the other direction.

 

I saw a whirl of activity out of the corner of my eye, realized it was a cat running towards a dove, and gave a little shriek.  The tabby, startled, turned towards me and there, to my horror, was my beloved chipmunk limp in the cat’s mouth.  Reader, I wailed.  It might even have been a loud scream.  At any rate, it was such an anguished sound that Sean, who was upstairs at the time, figured that something deadly was happening to me, Owen, or Maple.  He thus grabbed his phone, so disturbed at the sounds coming from downstairs, and dialed 911.  He then ran and found Owen completely fine in virtual school, and ran downstairs and saw me physically fine yet in mourning for my striped fellow.  He had to tell the 911 operator that his wife and son (and dog) were fine, that the outburst had been over the sad fate of a chipmunk.  Much giggling ensued from the operator, and much wrath from Sean.

 

It was a long time before I could laugh at the incident.  It played out over and over in my head.  I kept seeing the cat turn in slow motion, the spiked corona virus himself, and face me, maskless and isolated and vulnerable.