A Squirrel, A Neighbor, and Feeling Seen

a master-class in how nature makes everyone feel seen

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I really wish I had a portrait of the actual subject of my story today, but we will have to make do with similar portraits, and a little backstory.

This is an Eastern Gray Squirrel, one of our delightfully fluffy forest neighbors here in Downeast Maine. We call him Goliath, actually, because he visits us just a couple of times a year and is absolutely a giant compared to our everyday Red Squirrels :) He’s quite similar to the Gray Squirrels that used to be our backyard neighbors almost ten years ago when our family lived on the opposite coast in Bellingham, Washington.

We lived in a neighborhood near city-center, in a fairly urban landscape, with shops and homes and apartments all stacked among busy streets and parking lots and alleys. Still, nature always finds a way, and birds and squirrels and deer were constantly weaving their various wild ways amongst the tangled tumbles of trees and shrubs dotting postage-stamps lawns.

When you’ve got three young kids who get endlessly excited about seeing the little wild creatures, you get to know your wild neighbors almost as well as your two-legged ones. We fed the birds, and pointed at the deer, and watched the squirrels tirelessly chase each other over branches and fences and power lines.

By happy chance, our neighborhood gang of Gray Squirrels included one individual who was a black morph. Gray Squirrels are typically gray with a white belly, but black morphs are like little panthers, just sleekly coal black all over. It’s always fun to encounter something unusual, and because he was so recognizable, he inevitably became a family favorite.

At the time, my boys were in kindergarten and second grade, and their little baby sister was toddling around at just three years old. In the mornings, we would all walk together to school, and my daughter and I would walk home after. The walk home was a bit of a Family-Circus-dotted-line affair, her being erratically curious, and me trying my patient best to shepherd all those curlicues into the approximation of the direction of home, while reminding myself that it really was okay to take our time.

Right in front of this one particular house was this one particular low stone wall, which my daughter absolutely adored. Every morning, she rediscovered it to her delight, clambering up the stones like an alpine explorer, reaching her hands out to me so that she could jump down, circling around to do it Again! Again! I was often full of the mildly exasperated chuckles of a mom with young kids, caught in the tension between a future moment holding a million things to do and a present moment spilling over with overwhelming cuteness.

An older Black couple lived in this particular house, and we often waved to each other in passing during the various intersections of our daily lives. As he was out grilling, as we ran into her at the grocery store, as he rode by in safety orange on his bicycle - and every school morning, as she watched us from her front porch on our way home. But this one particular morning, as my daughter and I traversed the stone wall mountain peaks as usual, my neighbor made her way down to the sidewalk. “I just wanted to tell you, parents are always in such a hurry, it’s really nice that you let her stop and play here.”

We continued our friendly chat when, suddenly, a squirrel darted across the lawn. He was the black-morph Gray Squirrel, and my daughter recognized him and was very excited. We would see him in our back yard, too, I told my neighbor, and he was our favorite one.

“Oh yeah,” she told me, “he comes around here all the time. I feed him, every day.” And I will never forget the mischievous sparkle she got in her eye as she leaned in a little closer to me and said, “I call him Blackie, you know, ‘cuz he’s Black. And I feed him more than the other ones, because he’s different.” We shared the absolute warmest laugh, and my heart melted and broke and grew all at once.

Washington state is not a super-diverse place. In this busy urban neighborhood where, over the course of a lifetime, my neighbor had probably always seen many faces that looked like mine, and few faces that looked like hers, she had connected with a little wild neighbor who, we both agreed, was an absolute treasure because he was different.

I have never forgotten that wonderful black-morph Gray Squirrel. I have never forgotten that neighbor. And I have never forgotten that moment of connection, with the squirrel, with my neighbor, with the realization that this wild creature had made her feel seen in a way I’d never really thought of before.

If only we could look at each other, every day, and recognize just how wonderful it is to be different. To see that each one of us is not like the others. To notice, and to celebrate, and to treasure difference.

It has been said that if everyone is special, no one is. But actually, if we could truly internalize the fact that everyone is special, everyone would be. All we have to do is see it.

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