Dearest Rachel –
Some days, there’s just not that much out of the ordinary that’s happening to me personally to tell you about, so I have to rely on the news, or a dream, or just something that comes to mind, to tell you about on a given day. It’s less, in terms of the sheer volume of words, than would pass between us on an average day, once upon a time, but when it feels like I have to have a specific set topic these days – and one that doesn’t duplicate from letter to letter, because while the spoken word is ephemeral from hour to hour, let alone day to day, what’s been written becomes a permanent record that shouldn’t be repeated too often – what I write to you about tends to be based on something I feel like I can make a significant essay about.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that what I write to you about is actually significant. The topics are just unusual enough to be worthy of comment, in a way that any conversation we might have had about our days apart (“how was work?” versus “how were things with Daniel?”, neither of which are standard questions anymore anyway) back in the day might not have been.
As a result, the longer I’m at this, the less these letters sound like a conversation I would have had with you. Which, I suppose is understandable; if nothing else, I have to hold up my end with the understanding that there will be no interjections, no questions, no input from you to react to. Whatever I say has to be worth reading about (and worth writing, since it takes considerably more effort to put into print than to simply speak it aloud. I do wonder, if we were to write down everything we were to say before we said it, if we wouldn’t learn to choose our words that much more carefully going forward), so I find myself on the lookout for strange sights and occurrences – no matter how otherwise small and insignificant they might be – in a way that I never was when we were together, so that I have something to tell you about. Some days have things that came up, while on others, I have to make something up, while other days have more little things coming up than I can muster time and energy to work on in the moment.
A day or two ago, I had one of those moments; I woke up to find a text message from Daniel from the night before. It would seem that he went outside in the cool of the evening to wander the streets as he will occasionally do, and discovered a squirrel lying dead between his car and Logan’s. Since Logan almost never leaves the house during the week, and Daniel only drives once or twice a week to get lunch for himself, he suspected it could have lain there for several days. It certainly smelled like it, in any event, despite the fact that, where it was positioned, neither of the boys could have missed it if they were getting into their cars, and both their drivers’ sides faced the corpse. His message concluded with a note that he’d emptied a can of Febreze on the thing (so if it wasn’t dead when he encountered it – as unlikely as that might have been under the circumstances – he made certain to finish it off himself, however unwittingly), but couldn’t bring himself to move it, due to the stench, and would I be willing to do something about it when I got up in the morning?
Were it not for the fact that it was a Saturday, and I had to get to the men’s Bible study, I would have taken my own sweet time about getting to this assignment. But as I was up and had places to be, I got out there as soon as I was dressed. Fortunately, Daniel had hung a succession of plastic bags, one inside the other like a trash bag version of matryoshka dolls, on the front door for me to scoop the carcass up.
Unfortunately, our trash bin was so full already that there was no room for the remains. In any event, while I wasn’t having to deal with any smell that I could detect (neither that of decay nor the cloyingly artificial scent of fake wood that the aerosol purported to replicate), the squirrel was under assault by a squadron of several dozen flies taking their bites out of the corpse. It would not do to have this thing sitting atop the overflowing pile already in the bin, attracting that many more of the verminous creatures (and possibly exuding an ever-increasing odor) for another couple of days. I decided to use the layers of bags as an oven mitt to grab the body, haul it to the corner of the property – right by where we would eventually set the bins for pickup Tuesday morning – and let nature take its course. I reasoned that I could encourage more and larger scavengers to deal with the mess from a distance, rather than having it right up against the house.
As I was setting the squirrel down in its new resting place, I looked up to see that I was staring square in the face of a local police trooper, with his automobile lights flashing blue and red. Had I violated some local ordinance, and how had he gotten there almost before I committed the offense (and how had I not seen him while I was doing all this)?
Well, it turned out that, just as I was so intent on getting the squirrel away from the house that I didn’t notice him, he was attending to another, equally trivial, matter to the point where, if there was any law or regulation against what I was doing, he overlooked it in turn. There happened to be several paving stones in the middle of the road, which I would have run over if I were to pull out of the driveway in that moment, and quite possibly damaged the car doing so. He asked me if I could help him get them out of the road for that very reason, and I obliged.
With such a headstone erected for the critter, and the stones out of the way of potential drivers, the policeman thanked me – still either unaware or unconcerned about the corpse mere inches from where I set the stones up – got in his car and drove off, while I made my way back inside to wash my hands thoroughly from the adventure.
Like I said, it was a small, trivial moment, but one that doesn’t happen every day – either part of it, in fact. And to have them both happen concurrently made it seem particularly strange, even if it still felt small and unimportant. So, while I’ve been able to keep up with my letters to you without the addition of this letter, I thought I might just add this one as well, for your amusement.
If you happen to see the squirrel where you are – I’ve really no idea how things work with animals, as I doubt they’re capable of sin, per se, but would they end up in heaven? And how would you know who belonged to this body? – let him know he’s got himself monument, however temporary it might be. And of course, keep an eye on us, honey, and wish us luck, as I’m pretty sure we’ll need it.
Letters to Rachel 