Yesterday I went to turn off the hose that was watering the magnolia tree, you remember the magnolia tree,that replaced the magnolia tree that replaced the old magnolia tree that was here but dead when we moved in? Long, boring story but anyway I went to turn off the hose and saw, lying on his side, a small mouse, breathing rapidly in the shade of the house. He didn’t move when I came near and when I accidentally dropped the hose end on the slab of stone he lay on he twitched but didn’t go anywhere. So I knew he was dying, and I wondered what I was supposed to do about it. I thought I could kill him with a shovel, or I could move him with a shovel, or I could do nothing.

I chose, of course, to do nothing, and now he is there, dead, today. There are cats that come over from the neighbor’s houses, but I don’t know that they’ll eat him when he’s already dead. Will the possum whom we used to feed, generously, on chicken bones and other items from our garbage, prior to our discovery of the bungee cords that now fasten the tops of the garbage cans firmly to the bottoms, come back and do us this service? David said, Won’t the squirrels take care of it? and I said, You mean the squirrels that eat nuts? but I have to admit that it really does seem like something that the squirrels should do. What do they do around here, anyway, except quarrel with each other and jump from the trees to the roof?

The children are fighting downstairs. I can hear them thudding into the walls. Early this morning I thought that one of the children was upstairs, dropping marbles on the floor above my head, but it was squirrels dropping nuts in the gutter, instead. The children were asleep in their rooms.

Now the children are fighting downstairs. Henry has a friend over and I’m sure this is part of the fight—John would like to be included in the play date—but the boys don’t need something to fight about in order to fight. They have all of childhood and adulthood to fight about. They can fight about the possibilities of outer space and endless time.

Yesterday morning David left for work and the children woke and came into my room. I turned on the bedside lamp and everything was cozy and nice. You’re warm, Henry said, getting under the covers. John sat on the floor reading. Then I went to the bathroom and closed the door and they started hitting each other. On the phone later David and I imagined what happens when I close the door. The children turn to each other. What should we do? one of them asks. I could hit you in the head, says the other. You hit me in the head last time, says the first one. Anything else? Naw, all out. All right, all right, hit me in the head. Then, cooperatively, lovingly, they hit each other and cry.

I’m writing a story about a woman who becomes a graffiti artist in the suburbs, and now I spend my time thinking about what I would do as a graffiti artist. Inspired by Banksy's rats, I might make a lot of squirrel art. Dress the squirrels up and have them deliver critiques. There are a lot of squirrels around here, including a family of black squirrels whose base of operations is quite close to our house. Once I was walking my exercise loop and became worried that a black squirrel was following me, but then I realized there were just a lot of black squirrels. So then I worried that they had organized surveillance.