New Years Eve, 2025: Maple Grove Forest Preserve

4 p.m., 33F, cloudy, wet snow

Snow is dropping sparse but heavy and wet this afternoon, tapping against leaves and the pages of my open notebook, moistening my sweatshirt.

The snow goes out soggy and white, eroding away from the upper surfaces of logs, leaving patches beneath knots on the white oak trunks where branches have broken away. Melted snow or raindrops hang from the ironwood branches beside marcescent leaves. It is hard to distinguish right now whether the snow is falling and melting or whether these drops are just rain falling. Perhaps I am passing between snow and rain as I walk, with warm cells the size of houses circulating above the treetops in the otherwise-just-freezing air.

A large squirrel races across the trail at full tilt, leaps onto a white oak and shelters behind it, head down. As she does so, I am distracted by the sound of two somethings calling from the other side of the hill that flanks the ephemeral pond in the middle of Maple Grove. What are they? They might be red-bellied woodpeckers, but that’s not correct. They are too strident and high-pitched. The squirrel jumps off the oak and bounds across to another tree nearby and races up it and is gone from sight.

Then the somethings come over the hill. They are small dogs, one like a Pomeranian and the other like I don’t know what. They career around the trees yipping and barking, and I hear their owner calling to them. His head bobs into view over the hill. He shouts an apology from a distance. We smile at each other. No need to apologize. That’s dogs.

Then the dogs meet up at a single tree and are barking with particular intensity at something above them. It is the squirrel I watched a minute earlier, or one of her friends, someone of similar girth and length, 30 feet up in a sugar maple. The dogs are giving the squirrel no rest. They feel they have treed her, given her no options, and everyone should know. Perhaps they will get the beast today, despite the fact that they never get a squirrel, no matter how hard they try. The squirrel is unconcerned. She watches them. She starts to climb. Then she loses her footing. She falls from her position higher than the highest point of our house and lands on her back in the leaf litter, bounces just a bit. The dogs are on her in a fraction of a second, and I am certain she’s a goner. But the squirrel is too fast. She has twisted her body around and scampers up a nearby tree before the dogs can get her. I can hardly keep her in view as she runs away.

The squirrels chatter excitedly in their last few minutes of daylight on New Year’s eve. This day probably does not mean anything more or less to them than any other day of the year. On the walk home, I jump over a curb and my toe catches, and I sprawl on the ground. I am unhurt and pick myself up quickly, but not so quickly that those dogs wouldn’t have gotten their horrible little teeth into my calf and dragged me down. I think of myself as a reasonably competent human being in spite of this stumble. I would not last one week as a squirrel.

I’ll have memories of moments like this from the 55th year of my life when I am 90. The squirrels may not. One of their members has escaped death once again. Did she realize it as it was happening, much less remember it at the end of the day? As she chatters with her friends this New Year’s day, will she tell them she loves them with just a little more emphasis than usual? Will she express or even consider how grateful she is to have made it through one more season in her magnificent forest? How she loves to climb trees? How good it is to have this good strong body and limber backbone that lets her bounce—bounce!—after falling half the height of a tree into the pockmarked snow, and elude two ferocious little dogs?

I suspect not. We’ll have to do it on her behalf. Happy New Year, friends and family.