Elegy to the white squirrel

For months, there was a white squirrel that had moved into our yard and made our outside living spaces her own. White as first-fallen snow, with ruby-colored eyes surrounded by a rim of baby-pink, with light-catching fur and a bushy, always-twitching tail, the squirrel became a fixture of our daily landscape.

She (and we knew she was a "she" because a gray-squirrel "he" was often chasing and trying to mount her) would come every day to the front porch to eat the birdseed that falls to the ground and to the back deck to steal the food from the birds. In making us her own, she became "our" white squirrel. Not because we could ever own or tame her, but because we became invested in her well being and I made sure she always had plenty of water to drink and goodies to nibble at in that funny hurried way in which squirrels eat their food.

Today, as I took the dogs out for a late walk in the afternoon, I saw a white shape at the foot of the gigantic cottonwood tree in my neighbor's front yard. I stepped closer and to my dismay saw the white squirrel. She looked very peaceful with her small beady eyes closed, almost huddled against the foot of that humongous tree. It seems that death -- that hungriest and most unavoidable of all guaragüaos -- had found and taken her at the very moment when she had started climbing toward her nest.

Once, driving down a country road in Puerto Rico, I saw a red-tailed hawk sweep down from nowhere and catch a pigeon in mid air. That, I thought awed, is what sudden death must be. Hawk-like, sweeping down with fully extended claws and powerful silent wings flapping, taking what it comes for with unwavering and unfeeling accuracy, leaving a sad confetti of feathers floating in the space where its prey had been only a moment before. Who mourns the pigeon? I wondered. Is she or he missed back in the nest? Does someone, a passing bird perhaps, notify those who care or is it like it never happened?

Always, my heart breaks at the cruel callousness of death. This has been the saddest of winters.

Today, when my husband came home from work, he got the shovel and we buried our white squirrel. I commended her to God and we committed her to the ground: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We buried her right next to Mr. Robin's cousin.

Today, the white squirrel rests in a patch of ground where, fittingly, a tiny spray of white snowdrops had sprung from the freshly thawed, spring-ready and life-giving earth.