Message in a Bulb

I concocted a great mystery around the assumption that café lights are fragile things.

In this myth, a neighborhood squirrel named Future Pelt deviled me with his mischief, leaving a riddle on my flagstone patio: the socket and intact bulb from the lights dangling overhead.

The mystery goes back several weeks, when Future Pelt first made eye contact with me as he started out across the wood fence around our patio. He hopped forward, stopped, looked me in the eye, and hopped forward again. At the pine tree, he rose on his haunches and reached for a taste of the cord powering the lights that give my patio its heady glow on summer evenings.

I watched from the elevated porch out my back door and summoned the voice I once used on two wayward toddlers testing their limits. I said, “No,” stretching the word out long and low, assuring the toddler-squirrel that I knew that he knew that what he was doing was wrong.

Future Pelt lowered his body onto his grubby little paws and scampered off.

I came down the steps and looked up at the pine where it supports the lights. I saw that Future Pelt had been sharpening his teeth on something tasty in the cancer-causing oils of the plastic and rubber that a company called FEIT uses to manufacture my summer-time luminescence.

–

I know Future Pelt and Future Pelt knows me.

He’s one of the many neighborhood squirrels that climbed the tree out front to reach the playground I call my roof, deviling my mornings with his noisy footfalls before I had the branches pruned back to prevent his access.

Future Pelt is one of the many neighborhood squirrels that stop me on my walks, eliciting a whistled hello from my lips. Future Pelt is one of the many neighborhood squirrels who scurry to the far side of a trunk when I stop to watch from the near side, and scurries back again when I look around the trunk to watch him climb.

In other words, not one single squirrel in this nut-filled neighborhood of squirrels and humans has any reason at all to view me as a threat. I’m just that guy taking that walk and an inordinate level of interest — entirely unreciprocated — in the woodland creatures occupying these parts.

–

Days after my encounter with Future Pelt, the toddler, the mystery appeared. The socket and intact bulb set upon the flagstones. Looking up, I saw the clean-shorn wire a good eight feet above and six or seven feet to the side of its origins on the wire near the pine.

“How the –?”

That the bulb did not shatter is one thing, and an experiment this morning bears out its resilience. “It’s plastic,” one of my now-teen former toddlers said, his voice all Duhhh. “Its designed for the outdoors and swinging in the wind.”

But how did the bulb land so far from its vertical origins? Ten times I climbed a step stool and ten times I dropped the bulb (I have video of this scientific approach worthy of Youtube). Each time, the bulb landed intact. Each time, except once, the bulb remained within the rock garden just a foot or two from where it fell.

One time, to replicate the possible momentum of a squirrel chewing a socket free and falling forward on release, I flicked the bulb slightly toward the patio. It landed near the spot where I first came upon the enigma, and it’s possible this final experiment explains away my myth-making. My sons prefer this answer.

I prefer my own theory: Future Pelt PLACED it there. He chewed the socket clean, held it in his mischievous little paws, transferred the item to his teeth for the scramble down the pine, and set it many improbable feet from the trunk.

Having tested my limits, he was sending a message about who’s really in charge in this neighborhood, chortling as I scratched my head and said, “How the –?”

Turns out these neighborhood squirrels, this Future Pelt, really do enjoy my whistled greetings, that my communication all these years has not been in vain. I’ve gotten through to them, and they to me.

“We’re in charge,” the bulb and socket say to me. “We the squirrels run this nut farm.”

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