Squirrels are cute and furry and absolutely adorable. But my wife calls them “little turds.” Actually, my wife is a former newspaperwoman and she does not use as mild a word as “turds,” but it is as close as I can get in a family newspaper.
Our neighborhood squirrels dig up the dirt of all of our potted plants. They slurp up the sugar water from our hummingbird feeder. They eat our tomatoes and leave the half-chewed tomato carcasses on our deck to torment us.
They ate so many of our tomatoes that we actually stopped growing them. So now they take our neighbors’ tomatoes and bring them to our house where they leave the half-chewed tomato carcasses on our deck. That’s annoying, but also kind of funny.
Then again, I’m not the one who does the gardening, so I don’t take it personally. To my mind, squirrels are still cute and furry and adorable until they do something to antagonize me. Which they just did.
Living nearly half of my life in the South has left me with a deep and abiding thirst for iced tea. I drink it daily, in quantities large enough to drown a squirrel. Which, come to think of it, isn’t a bad idea.
In the summer, I make sun tea . It’s impossibly smooth, with none of the tannins that bring a bitter edge to iced tea. And it’s easy to make.
Simply fill a glass pitcher or bottle or even bowl with cold water, and add teabags. All you have to do is cover the glass pitcher or the bottle or the bowl and set it outside in the summer sun for 21⁄2 to 4.
