I knew of the spruce trees first. (You couldn’t live in this house and not know.) The blue spruce pair stands above our across-the-street neighbor’s house as sentinels, 60 feet tall and towering. Their branches hang mostly still, but life within them is anything but. Starlings, Eurasian-collared doves, Northern flickers, and the occasional Cooper’s hawk take turns sitting topper to the tree. Chickadees lace the outer branches in flight. Ravens, magpies, and crows quarrel out of sight, hidden within the inner branches.
Later, I knew the red squirrel lived there, too. The time I looked up to see her outstretched high high high in the tree, flinging cone after cone to the ground with abandon. The many times Squirrel scrambled to the lower branches of nearby tamarack, green ash, or mountain ash to chatter her complaints as I walked past with the dog.
I write from a desk in our living room that faces west. The tops of the spruces rise above the window to my right, the north. When the dog is home with me, I lift the bottom shade so she can watch the neighborhood happenings while I work.
In August, movement lifts my eye from the page. Squirrel, darting to and fro from her side of the street to ours. I see something large in her mouth, and though the green of it doesn’t quite fit, I assume it to be a cone, from tamarack or pine. The next time she crosses our way, I stand up, walk first to the front door to peer out, then to the back door, as she scoots past the tamarack, hops to the top of our fence, tightropes past the pines, and disappears behind our woodshed. A moment later, the alley sunflowers bend.
She reaches up, detaches the whole head of the sunflower with her hands. Places the head in her mouth. Scrambles to the top of the wood stack, sits, and proceeds to remove green leaf after leaf, yellow petal after petal, spitting periodically. She spins the sunflower in her hands as she works, whittling it down. Devours the seeds, discards the shells.
Squirrel returns to take another, only this time, post-decapitation, she hops back to the fence, retraces her steps, and crosses the street with the whole head in her mouth, returning to the safety of the spruce to cache her prize. Eat one, cache one, repeat.
I watch her, consumed.
Spruce, Sunflower, Squirrel, teach me provisioning. Teach me sustenance. Sustenance: “food and drink regarded as a source of strength; nourishment.” Or “the maintaining of someone or something in life or existence.” How the sunflowers didn’t used to be there. Until woodshed, until buildup of sawdust fodder, until finches disperse neighbor’s sunflower seeds, until we stop pulling “weeds.”
Come winter, when I see Squirrel, I will see more than squirrel: I will see sunshine stored in sunflower seeds, see late-season squirrel forage, see spruce shelter. It is a sustenance of spirit, survival linked to co-existence.
