Loathsome Squirrels

I loathe squirrels.  But more about that later.  I truly enjoy the word “loathe”. 

It feels superior to “hate”, which is a short, choppy, forthright invective. 
Loathe… it fairly rolls off one’s tongue with disdain; distancing is inherent, understood. 
Loathe says more. 
I was taught that hate is a strong word – be careful how you use it.  I believe that, in order to hate a person, you have to have had really strong feelings about the person in the first place.  And what if you didn’t?  Then you could just loatheeeeeeeeeeee them…or it.

But then, if that person had really strong feelings for you, and you wanted to get away from them, well then they could very well “hate” or plot vengeance or a vendetta or, at the very least, they could have some dark thought(s) and plan (concentrate) some weirdness to happen to you.  Not necessarily dangerous things, but enough to put a scare in you and make you wonder why….and I wouldn’t call this voodoo or anything that extreme, but well, I think I was under this dark kind of spell for a period of time.  And I know who did it, and I believe it to be true.  But it’s taken me a lot of years to come to this belief.  Mostly because, well, the things that happened to me during that period of time were, well, so very odd.

I once had a squirrel drop out of a tree and fall on my head.  It kinda slid thru my hair and plopped with a splash at my feet in the water.  I was standing knee deep in a lake, talking with a friend.  Ever see a wet squirrel?  Don’t ask. There was a lot of screaming and splashing and running involved. 
For years I had a loathsome reaction to squirrels.  I never thought about why.  A person would say something like “Oh look at the squirrel – isn’t he cute?”
Cute?  CUTE! 
“Rat with a tail” I would spit out vehemently. 

Recently the falling squirrel story tumbled out to a co-worker.  Aha!  Yes, I have a reason (if I need one) to loathe squirrels and then somehow the story of the fish on my windshield came up at the same time.  Was it time to dump my weird animal stories?  Could I possibly interpret this, after all this time, into some deeper meaning?  Well, the fish story happened probably within a year, or maybe it was the same year, of the squirrel falling on my head.

I was on my way home early one evening to my remote log cabin, tucked away in the woods. It was still light enough to see the remains of the day as I made the turn and slowed to coast down the small hill.  SPLAT!  I couldn’t identify what it was immediately.   I mean, who would expect a fish to land on your windshield?  But then I clearly saw it and I slowed down, pulled into the short, rutted area I called a driveway and got out and saw it and then I got a small spade and a dust pan and I kind of scraped it off the windshield into the dustpan and I took it down to the lake and threw it in.  And I didn’t know what to think and so I put it out of my head, just because it was too weird to make sense and other things were taking up more room in my mind.

But the next day when I mentioned this to my bosses and a coworker – all men – they gave me a strange look.  Tom, the Italian guy said “Ooo – that’s bad, I mean it’s like “sleeping with the fishes or something.” I couldn’t take that seriously.  Various theories ensued but the one I went with all these years, was that a passing seagull or hawk or something had inadvertently dropped the fish as he was flying up from the lake, and it dropped on my car.  Okay, logical,  done. 

And there was that other incident involving a lake and the man’s car going in it, and the Chinese food and the new trench coat I had on, but that's probably another story, another time…