[nycfem]

I took another two hour walk in Riverside Park today. Squirrels seemed to be the theme. I saw a lot of them, rustling in the leaves and scurrying into the brush. Squirrels are so beautiful, and I am in awe of them. In fact it was a joke in my family that I was taken to the zoo as a child and seemed bored by all the animals but then saw a squirrel in the parking lot and pointed it out with much excitement. When I got cats, I remember thinking, it's like getting to have big squirrels that don't run away from me. But, really, squirrels are in a class of their own.

Here were the two oddest squirrel moments:

-a squirrel in the trash can seeking out food (one of those trash cans that is made out of a mesh pattern so it's easy for small animals to squeeze right in)

-the end of a squirrel's tail just sitting by itself in the middle of a path

I also came upon another site that I found myself thinking about. It was an old stone little one-room "house" right up against the woods with two windows and no other observable way to enter from the way I faced it. The windows had rusty, jail-like bars on them. Inside the house there were piles of leaves and dirt and nothing else. There were two shopping carts outside the house, each one tethered to the bars of each respective window. A mother and child passed by, and the child said, "Does anyone ever go inside?" And the mother said, "No one goes inside," and pulled her away. It was a creepy site, but then I started thinking how those shopping carts were most likely stored and hidden there by homeless people to use for storing and transporting stuff, like recycling bottles for money. There were a few empty bottles in the carts. I thought, "What if I reported those carts and tried to have them taken away?" Then I thought, "What a terrible thing to even think of as a fantasy! This was a smart idea, and they are being used for disenfranchised people's livelihood." The stone structure reminded me of a mausoleum in disrepair but still beautiful, while the carts seemed sad and ugly. But then when I thought of them being used by people and carefully locked there, I felt touched by the sight of them, as if they themselves were silenced people.

Then I found a winding staircase in the park with 87 steps called St. Clair Stairs, and I ran up and down it a few times.