All Hail the Patriotic Squirrel

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks around here at Elementaryhistoryteacher Central….Recently I’ve loaded my plate up with so much stuff I’ve needed a Chinet (you know….the Cadillac of paper plates) just to tote it all around.

Sadly in my rush to get around town and cross one more thing off my to-do list I’ve been leaving dead bodies in my wake….For some crazy reason squirrels and snakes seem to jump out at me when I least expect it. So far the carnage count from last week is three squirrels and one very long snake who thought the roadway might be an interesting place to work on his or her tan.

As much as squirrels annoy me and snakes just scare me to death I don’t relish hearing the sound and feeling the thud as their little bodies thump against the tires of my car.
It devastates me to kill an animal, and it really, really ruins my day.

Though I strongly feel squirrel are just rats with good PR, I don't really want to run them down with my car. One of the bushy-tailed creatures was hit on my street….close to my home. Gee, a neighborhood squirrel….not some random squirrel I didn’t know, but one that’s probably scampered across my yard, teased my cat, or even wintered in the attic of my home. It didn’t help that Dear Daughter jumped out of the car once I wheeled in the drive and ran up the street to take pictures with her cell phone camera of the BREAKING NEWS.

Mother, Teacher, Blogwriter crushes squirrel and abandons it to die alone….Details at 11!

Oh, the shame.....

That was the first death to occur at my hand last week….by the time I had killed two additional squirrels and then ran all four wheels over a snake stretched out across the roadway I decided I must do something to appease the Animal Kingdom. Perhaps that’s the only way I can avoid killing anymore creatures.

I actually stayed in all day today just to keep the death toll at a minimum.

Then I remembered I had saved the link to a story about a Michigan squirrel. Over Memorial Day the folks at Mount Hope Cemetery near Detroit place close to 1,000 small American flags on soldier’s graves. From one day to the next cemetery workers noticed many of the flags were missing….all that was left was the wooden stick the flags had been attached to.

Hmmm…was it the work of terrorists? Anarchists? Vandalizing hoards of teens?

Nope.

Just a dang squirrel….and a patriotic one at that.

My kind of squirrel! I bet it knows the pledge as well.

The little varmit detached a flag stapled to a staff and carry it up a tree to its nest in front of the cemetery superintendent. The squirrel was using the flags to line its nest.

Here's a link in case you missed the story.

So, I hope by posting this I have now appeased the animals ,and they will just stay the heck out of my way for the rest of the summer.