Don’t feel like squinting at a screen? Close your eyes and hit play (or rather, hit play and THEN close your eyes) to hear me read this to you.
Our back yard is the only one nearby without a dog, so we’ve become the neighborhood hangout for other animals. Bunnies, birds, a couple of cats who rendezvous in the afternoon, and a pair of fat raccoons who waddle around our deck by night. We even had a very lost prairie dog show up once. But this story starts with one of the plentiful squirrels.
I was in my second-story bedroom, holding up my phone and pointing at a squirrel running along the fence while I recorded. It was of a particularly golden color, while most of the others were more orangey. I was transfixed, until movement at the top of my screen caught my attention. I looked up to see my corner neighbor staring back at me, directly behind the squirrel I was videoing, scowling at me and slowly pulling his shades down.
I shook my head, wide eyed. How does one sign, Noooo, dude, I wasn’t pointing at you, I’m not a creeper!! But it was too late. The shade was closed. To make matters worse, that neighbor is an officer of the law. I thought about walking around the block and explaining the situation, but decided to do nothing instead. No need to garner any further attention. Heaven forbid he saw what happened in the front yard!
Yeah, so in front, we get deer sometimes, and our neighbor once had a baby bear in their tree. We try to keep it classy out there. Well, our lawn guy, Josue does. He’s amazing. At some point, we had him start spraying for weeds in the yards, because I wanted the kids to be able to run around without the anxiety of the minefield of thistles that like to take over at the first sign of weakness.
Once, while I was watering the flowers in my pots out front, my daughter was enjoying said thistle-free grass by pretending to be a puppy. Puppies fetch things, as you know, so it wasn’t strange (for us) to see her crawling toward me holding a thin stick in her mouth. What was unusual was that it wasn’t a stick. It was a long, thin metal stake with a little yellow flag on the end of it indicating that children and pets should stay off the lawn. Apparently, Josue had recently applied herbicide, and neither puppies nor children pretending to be such should have been frolicking upon the grass. And certainly, they should not be licking the herbacide sign.
During her bath, I resolved to cancel the weed spray. Never liked it anyway. I had my raspberries and a volunteer chokecherry tree, so why not see what random weeds popped up, maybe get into foraging?
Unfortunately, the thistles, which had persisted in their fight for survival by moving into the raspberry patch, weren’t edible. But the raspberries held their own. These are Wyoming raspberries, mind. We got them from my in-laws’ house ten years ago. After Wyoming winters, they laugh in the face of a few thistles. They coexisted relatively well.
Until Josue got a helper. Careful not to peer into my cop neighbor’s corner, I checked the lawn mowing progress from my bedroom window one day, only to find the helper mowing over the last of my raspberries. The man had obviously encountered thistles before and knew they were a problem, but he didn’t recognize that the other stickery plants were about to flower and produce bucketfulls of red berries. He had lifted his lawn mower right over the log barrier surrounding the patch and had gone scorched earth on the whole thing. I was equal parts sad and confused. Has the helper never seen a raspberry plant? Is it normal to mow down garden beds?
Being Wyoming berries, they came back with a vengeance the next spring. By then, the weed killer was completely gone, and the other plants were free to go ahead and make their way up into the sun. Remember, I cancelled the weed killer because I like plants, and I don’t like poison. So what did my lawn do to reward my benevolence, but grow a huge poison plant.
For real. Like, one with the word poison right in the name. It was so pretty and fernlike for a minute, before Google Lense told me, “Yo, don’t keep that. It’s poison hemlock. Fatal if eaten. But it could also be not that, and something totally benign.” Naturally, I let it grow to flower, just to be sure. And boy, did it grow, and it was 100% hemlock. That sucker got taller than me, like at least 7 or 8 feet tall. I called the county extension office to ask how to handle it, and they said mask, gloves, pull it up, throw it out. So I had a plan, for whenever I got around to tackling it.
In the meantime, we had a birthday party with about fifteen first graders at our house, the non-plant-related details of which is a story for another day. But I decided to sit outside whenever the kids played out there, you know, to enjoy the nice weather, to keep the peace, and to make sure nobody touches the GINORMOUS POISON BUSH just chilling in the corner. Shortly after, while I was thinking about whether the cop neighbor (who already thought I was a weirdo) was up on his plant identification, and just waiting for an excuse to come question me about my intentions for the plant, I went out to check on it.
It was dead. Yellow, dry, shriveling. Everything else around it (which I learned were mostly edible plants like Lamb’s Quarters, Amaranth, Mullein and Purslane) was fine. The poison had become the poisonous had become the poisoned. The noxious abomination had been targeted and destroyed. I’m not mad, but I blame Josue’s helper.
Speaking of squirrels,
My book’s got squirrels in it! Two of them have names, and several others have numbers. I made little drawings to go at the end of each chapter, and obviously I chose to feature a squirrel for one of them. Here he is! Yes, he’s wearing a harness and spy gear. If that doesn’t make you want to read the book, I don’t know what will.
If you do want to read it, you’ll be glad to know copyedits are in, and the publisher is now proofreading, putting together advance reader copies, and finalizing formatting choices! Advance copies should be ready for my early readers THIS WEEK!! Maybe even tomorrow. Correction, THEY WERE SENT THIS MORNING! And they have the chapter art in them!! Let’s go, ARC readers!!
Fully-formatted official ebook and print release is September 24. Preorder Here
I have a few events coming up, including:
Launch party in Salt Lake City while FanX is in swing Sept 25-27
At least one panel and one solo presentation at FanX, but I’m not sure I’m allowed to reveal details yet.
Zoom presentation for a Colorado writers group
Local launch party October 2, 6-8 p.m. at Sudden Fiction Books in Castle Rock, CO. RSVP on the Facebook event here, so I look popular.
And more. Details to come!
If you’re looking for a fun and interesting guest, I’m available for classes, podcasts, book clubs, or whatever. Okay, not whatever. I have my limits.
Check out the list of authors and details on the Splinter Press scifi anthology here. I’ve read several stories that will be in here, and I’m so excited for this. Mine is pretty fab, too, if I do say so myself. Kickstarter launching soon.
Interested in being an ARC reader? Sign up here!
I’m too tired to be even slightly wise at the moment, but I can tell you this: Don’t accidentally peeping tom your cop neighbor, and be nice to the squirrels. You can never be sure who they’re working for.
This may be the best newsletter you’ve ever read, but it’s not the penultimate. Unless, that is, you only plan to read one other newsletter EVER FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.
Though this word is sometimes used to mean “even better than the ultimate,” it actually means second-to-last. I do love that we have a word for that. See the conversation about Wallace Shawn that came up in my feed and reminded me of this word’s existence.
Thanks for hanging out with me today! If you haven’t subscribed, go ahead and do that, because I have many more funny stories, and we all need a reason to smile here and there, right? I’ll see you next time!
We had squirrels in California. They would start wars with the chickens and bunnies. It got gang warfare at time.