Squirrel Tales (continued)

This is Chapter 6 of my middle grade novel, Squirrel Tales. Chapters 1 through 5 were published earlier this week. I plan to post a chapter each day through Sunday, April 14th - to celebrate Squirrel Week! - and then a chapter a week after that through the finish.  Thanks for reading!

SQUIRREL TALES: 6

by  Mary Lee Corlett

BUNDLE FIVE: TALES TO REMEMBER

Changes, especially unwelcome ones, can sometimes sneak up on you like the neighborhood cat. Our days seemed normal, yet we were all beginning to get the uneasy feeling that something important was happening somewhere, and we knew nothing about it.

         Hazel rummaged around in her nest until she came up with a bit of seedcake left over from last night’s dinner and a half-eaten crab apple.  It was past suppertime.  The sisters were getting hungry, but the rain hadn’t let up much, and who knew where Black Dog had gone off to, so they decided to eat in tonight.  Nutmeg had gone off to her nest on a similar quest and had just returned with a couple of acorns and a peanut.

                 “You’ve gotten pretty good at carrying a bunch of things at once,” remarked Hazel.   

 “It’s not exactly a feast,” Nutmeg noted, surveying their combined provisions, "But it’ll have to do.”
 “I’ll make some more tea.”
“Wish you had some Sassafras.” Nutmeg mumbled again under her breath, careful not to say it so that her sister would hear her. “That would be nice,” she said much more loudly.  “I’d love some.”

They worked while they ate, trying to be careful not to get food spots on the Leaves.  “Pin the Tail!” Nutmeg squeaked as she held up a label from a cranberry juice bottle, now covered with Hazel’s markings.  “I love that game!” 

“Yeah, even though I usually win it,” Hazel returned with a smile.

 “Do not!” Nutmeg protested. 

“Do too!”

 Nutmeg opened her mouth, about to start another round, but then snapped it shut and decided it would be easier just to change the subject.  “Mrs. Such is so pleased that you are writing down these stories.  She seems especially happy that you’ve written down some of her poems and tales!” 

“I know.  She says: ‘When we put all our Tales together, they tell who we are—and who we will become.’” 

I’m not sure I know what she means by that.”

“Me neither actually, but I think it means we have to know about ourselves for the sake of our future.  Or something like that.  She also says, ‘The better we remember, the better we will be.’”

“Ooh…Uh-huh….” Nutmeg pretended to understand, but this line of thinking was starting to give her a headache.  She decided that maybe for the moment she should forget the deep thinking and just focus on sorting the Leaves.

The sisters worked long into the evening, but it became clear that the project was going to take longer than one night.  The stash turned out to be deeper than even Hazel had remembered. There seemed to be hundreds and hundreds of Leaves, each a small testament to the shared lives of all of the squirrels in the neighborhood, each a nugget rich with description or reminiscences, individual moments or collective experiences.

             “Wow, this is an old one!” Hazel had dug deep and was now holding up a tattered, yellowed envelope with a ripped up cellophane window.  “This is about the Garden and Mrs. Tiggy-winkle.  I wrote that during my first Season.” 

                “And she’s still not talking!” Nutmeg giggled.

They poured more tea and retrieved more and more Leaves, all the while sharing the memories the Leaves evoked, the sadness and the celebrations. They talked about all that had come to pass in the neighborhood, struck for the first time by all the things that had changed since Hazel had begun writing. 

 “The stories are all here.  We just need to tie them together so that they make sense.” Nutmeg said with authority.  But organizing them in a way that seemed right proved to be trickier than Nutmeg had first imagined.  They started by making piles, first by individual squirrel or subject, but that didn’t seem to be working: “Shimmy and Digs need to be together sometimes.” Hazel noted. 

            “And how do we combine all the ones about Peanuts?” added Nutmeg. “You write about them a lot, but for a whole bunch of different reasons.  They’re scattered all over the place in your Leaves and they can’t be grouped logically.” 

Next they tried to place the Leaves in the order in which they were written.  “Shoots and Nuts, this isn’t working either,” an exasperated Hazel lamented after a while.  “I didn’t follow any particular pattern when I wrote the Leaves, but we can’t arrange them without a pattern; they won’t make any sense that way.  We need another idea.”

“We need more Piles!”

“More Piles?”

“Yeah!  Lets just keep making piles and then put the piles in an order that is as close as we can get them to the order in which things happened.” 

And so, the sisters made piles.  Lots and lots of piles.  The first piles were, of course, about their earliest days together in Mother’s nest.