Bright, new squirrel unnecessary

My wife spoke first.

“Was that …”

“A blue squirrel?” I said, finishing her sentence.

It was breakfast time, and admittedly neither of us had had our coffee yet.

And it had been a long, stressful week.

But just the same, when you’re sitting at the kitchen table, looking out into your own backyard, you don’t expect to see a blue squirrel.

And this one was, indeed, blue.

The backyard has squirrels in abundance. The combination of big trees and an array of bird feeders attracts them.

It used to be just fox squirrels, the kind with reddish brown fur. But these days, there are gray squirrels and the disturbingly rat-like black squirrels as well.

Never until that moment at breakfast time had blue been a part of the color palette.

We both took a long slug of our coffee. The blue squirrel had scampered across the patio and part of the back yard and seemed to have climbed up into a redbud tree.

“Spray paint?” I wondered.

“Spray paint,” said my wife.

Another pause and more black coffee.

“Who would spray paint a squirrel?”

“And why would you spray paint a squirrel blue?”

I wondered for a few minutes about the people who mark locations of gas lines and water lines. They’re certainly generous with the spray paint when it comes to asphalt, sidewalks and people’s lawns.

But they tend to use yellow or white or orange. Not blue. Bright blue.

“Kids?” one of us wondered.

It was possible to imagine someone horsing around with a can of spray paint, maybe painting their bike when a squirrel got in the way.

Or maybe it was a craft project gone horribly wrong, though what sort of craft project involves a squirrel is beyond me.

(Just paint a squirrel, let it scamper over the canvas and voila!)

Maybe it was intended to be some sort of school mascot. What college fields a football team called the Fighting Blue Squirrels?

By then, the coffee had started to kick in and the squirrel had disappeared into the trees.

“Did that just happen? Did we really see that?’

“Yup, we really saw that.”

“And that paint’s not going to come off,” I said.

“Nope.”

At lunchtime, back at the same spot at the kitchen table, neither of us saw the blue squirrel. But both of us were still wondering about it.

How would the blue squirrel fit in with the others? Would the paint brand it as some sort of outcast? Can squirrels even see colors or are they color blind?

And again and again, why would anyone spray paint a squirrel?

That all happened a few days ago, and there’s been no sign of the blue squirrel since.

It may have moved on to some other backyard with even more bird feeders. But if it has and you encounter it, there’s no need to bring it back to our place.

You can have it. We have too many squirrels already in a rich assortment of more normal colors.