Frozen Pipes and the Death of a White Squirrel

Frozen Pipes and a White Squirrel

It's been polar here in Minnesota, land of ten thousand frozen lakes. Wind-chill well below zero and temperature an eager competitor. For the first time in 20 years, the pipes to our kitchen sink froze. Yes, they are close to an outer wall, but so are the pipes directly under them in the basement. To reach those lower depths, I had to wear a down robe AND my down coat, plus thin plastic gloves with heavy gloves over them, just to reach the cat litter box at the bottom of the basement stairs. Why the cat, who is mistress of two other cat boxes on the warm second floor, insisted on doing her business in such depths of cold is a miracle of feline sagacity.

For the past two days, I've spent a lot of time in the kitchen, first rinsing dishes in a little bathroom adjacent to the kitchen, then filling the tea pot and heating water on the stove to wash dishes in the frozen sink. I could have lugged the dishes upstairs to the bathtub, where warm water still gushed, but somehow the kitchen process seemed important. I told myself the warm water exiting the kitchen drain JUST MIGHT help thaw the frozen pipes.

Eventually, I asked husband Fran to drive me to the pharmacy where I purchased a heating pad. Walking home, I felt very proud of my hardiness, giving most of the credit to my North Dakota mother. Of course, I looked like a walking blimp. In her North Dakota hometown, children walked to school, their legs bound in multiple leggings, bodies stuffed into coats, cloaks, and mufflers, and their hands in double mittens. Their heads were wrapped in so many scarves, the children themselves were virtually unidentifiable. Luckily, there were only 10 children in her class, all perfectly familiar with each other, wrapped or unwrapped.

These days, we Minnesotans with well-heated homes and cars have it relatively easy, except for the people somehow bereft of decent housing who try to survive 20-below by running a car motor from time and time and hoping the numbness they start to feel isn't frostbite. This morning, as the temp rises toward 19 ABOVE, there's a sad StarTribune story of a homeless man who did just that with his pal of a dog. He himself was rescued by the police and taken to a shelter and from there to a hospital. The dog, finally found, appeared to be fine.  

Yes, at 20 below, stray dogs can survive for a time, as can most critters in my back yard. I work to help them, with a heated birdbath, which I fill every morning. On my multi-armed bird feeder pole, I hang suet and a sunflower cakes, and feeders filled with sunflower seeds. Finally I spread sunflower seeds and a mix of smaller seeds on two long pathways in the yard.

Mid-afternoon yesterday, I looked out the broad picture windows in our second floor bathroom to find an enormous red-tailed hawk bending over something white. These figures were was stationed in a leafless elm tree just behond our yard. Even now, as I write this, my heart starts beating erratically. The spill of white might have been the feathers of a dying pigeon, but as I stared, a white leg and tail appeared, splayed over the limb--it was "our" white squirrel, the only white one we had among all the other grays. Perhaps an albino, perhaps with hearing or eyesight loss, yet it staked out its spot every morning for munching seeds. A familiar member of the yard, and as welcome as the red-chested nuthatches, the red-bellied woodpecker (who seems twice as large as the little nuthatch), and the hairy and downy woodpeckers, the blue jays, chickadees, cardinals, finches, juncos and even a few crazy robins who left, I assume, the minute the temperature began to drop.

I couldn't tear myself away from the window, tears in my eyes, as the huge hawk, with its rear end lifting and falling, pulled at the squirrel body. This "winter kill" was happening as I watched, and the hawk was taking one of the denizens of my yard whom I'd come, in a mild way, to love. From time to time, the hawk would pause and turn its profile. The beak and nasal area were smeared with blood. It was making a meal of the white squirrel. It was devouring a creature I had come to love.

I know it's somewhat insane, to become protective and possessive of a wild creature. But I did love the white squirrel, and I did not love the hawk, though it was impossible not to admire its huge body, puffed out in the cold and the rigor of its yanks. But the hawk was an interloper and the white squirrel had gamely visited the yard for food and water, winter, spring, summer, autumn. It was the only white one. Would I have been as sad had the hawk begun to eat one of the grays? I might have been mesmerized by watching one creature devour another. But I doubt that I would have continued to feel the loss.