Reflections - The Nature of Things

Rills and the Gray Squirrel

Spence is for the birds. I’m against the bears. This sparked lively debates when winter rained into spring.

Visions of bears swirling through my head made my voice quaver. “It’s time to take the bird feeder down.” 

He watched a tufted titmice swoop in for a sunflower seeds and soar off. “The birds enjoy the seeds.”

“Hungry bears will roam soon. They’ll smell the seeds and traipse up the ramp.”

“Not yet. Don’t worry.”

This annual debate happens because we live in bear country. Hungry bears wake from hibernation and search for food—bird feeders are handy reservoirs. Neighbors on either side of us had spied bears drinking sugar water from their hummingbird feeders. A neighbor further down the road saw a bear rip off the top of a plastic garbage can and paw out her entire year’s supply of birdseed. I didn’t want bears smelling the sunflower seeds and making Wells Wood a stop on their circuit.

Our debate didn’t occur this year.

Winter dumped snow but warmer than normal temperatures melted it within a day if not hours. A bear could have left its den multiple times. When we went for our daily health walks, I only strapped on boot cleats once to totter over an ice-covered road. A month before calendar spring, Spence brought the bird feeder in at dinnertime.

The four times we had bear visits, black bears came at night. One came so quietly we wouldn’t have known if it hadn’t left poop in the pansy planter. The second bumped around, left a swatch of hair, and broke the gate which Spence had built to keep our old cats George and Emma in. Another bear, Spence observed lumber across the deck on all fours, round the corner to the porch, and search through buckets—for seed presumably.

The fourth, a huge black bear, scared me. He strolled up the ramp while Spence and I were sitting in the great room. Paralyzed in my chair, I hissed, “Turn off the lights.”

Much slower than I wanted, Spence walked to the switch by the front door, turned off the inside lights, and turned on the porch lights.

The bear didn’t amble to the porch. He stood on his hind legs, put a paw on either side of the empty bird feeder, and licked the perches with his long pink tongue.

Because Spence brought the feeder in at dinnertime and took it out at breakfast, I didn’t worry about sniffing bears.

I hadn’t counted on a different intruder.

The first week of March, our three tabby cats raced to the sliding glass door. Rather than stare at the chickadees swooping in, they glared at the deck floor.

An eastern gray squirrel scooped dropped sunflower seeds off the deck with its paws.

Thud-thud. The cats slammed their bodies against the glass.

The squirrel slammed back.

Having tested the solidness of the glass door, the squirrel continued its dining.

Gilbert and Ande wandered off. They would check on the squirrel from time to time, but it wasn’t their priority.

Rills, however, sat his ground. Ears alert and tail tucked, his eyes never left the seed-scarfing intruder. Days passed and Rills watched the squirrel by the door even when Spence cut chicken in the kitchen. Usually, Rills jumps on the counter, pokes his head around Spence’s hand, and snatches a chunk. With the squirrel on the deck, the smell of chicken in the kitchen didn’t cause the cat to budge.

Carrying two handfuls of cut chicken pieces, Spence crossed to the tile by the sliding glass door and yelled, “Rillzie, Gilbert, Ande! Chicken.” He set the piles of chicken on the tile near Rills.

Ande and Gilbert scampered up, hunkered down, and gobbled.

Rills, small but feisty, would normally pounce on his brothers and hog the treat for himself. He didn’t. Instead, he kept his eyes on the squirrel. Rills didn’t trust that intruder.

His instincts were right.

While I was washing breakfast dishes one morning, I heard, scratch, scratch. BANG! I dropped the saucepan, wiped my hands, and hustled to the sliding glass door.

Curled over its back, the gray squirrel’s tail pointed toward the house. Scratch, scratch.

Rills threw himself against the glass door. BANG!

The squirrel scampered across the deck and hid behind an empty flower pot.

“Good boy, Rills.” I petted the house protector.

Rills crouched. He didn't relax.

 

Rills Observing Squirrel on Side of Door

The squirrel, unsatisfied with the seed droppings, climbed the log wall beside the sliding glass door. Rills leapt and slammed the glass beside the pointy head peeking out parallel to the feeder.

The squirrel scrambled down. It eyed the cat, eyed the feeder, and climbed again. Using the door handle as a perch, the squirrel stretched toward the sunflower seeds exposing part of its belly.

Bam. Rills smacked the glass, sending the rodent scrambling for cover once again.

Whenever the squirrel climbed and reached, Rills countered with a leap-bam-smack.

Despite bears in the neighborhood and this year’s early spring, I’m arguing with myself that I don’t need to fret about leaving the bird feeder out. Rills is keeping the log house and the feeder seeds safe from the eastern gray squirrel. The squirrel is removing extra sunflower seeds from the deck floor. Spence is bringing the feeder in every evening. I can probably trust Spence’s judgment.

Or not.

Spence, after all, delights when I get out of bed in the morning. “I love your hair!” I have to believe him. His eyes sparkle, his cheeks glow under his beard, and he gives me a hug.

My hair must be a mess. “I worked on it all night for you.”

“You look so cute.” He steps back. “A bird could nest in that hair.”

 

Janet's Morning Hair

 Reflections - Parable of the Glass of Water

Glass of Water

Doris gets the credit.

She—a kindred spirit, retired teacher, and ally in the Meadville Vicinity Pennwriters group—bonded with me. I could count on Doris for lifting my spirits through frequent morning emails. Some made me smile at spelling inconsistencies (tough, cough, through, though). Others made me laugh at silly photos (a science project of eclipse stages illustrated with Oreo cookies). Her latest email made me think. It came the Tuesday after I posted “A Stressful Process.”

The story in that morning email described a young woman—most women are young compared to Doris and me—holding a glass of water over her head. The young woman twisted the half-empty, half-full explanation her audience expected by asking, “How heavy is this glass of water?” For her, the answer depended on how long the person held the glass. If I held the glass a minute—no problem. Holding it an hour, I would need Tylenol and a heating pad. A day? Impossible. I would have triggered an arthritis flare up long before the twenty-four hours ended.

In the parable the glass of water represented stress. Auditing French Creek Township’s finances had filled my glass. Grateful Doris sent me a health tip, I reasoned with myself. Put the glass down at night and rest. You won’t get overwhelmed. And put it down every fifteen minutes during the audit too.

Feeling my abdomen muscles unclench, I tapped computer keys to answer the email. “Love this, Doris. Thanks.”

“Thought you and your team could use that wisdom,” popped into my inbox.

Glass of stress raised aloft

Doris’s wise words cleared right off

I shut the computer down and drove to auditing determined to follow the advice of setting the glass of stress down every fifteen minutes or so. 

The complicated credit card bills altered my intentions. I thought we’d nearly tamed the messy paperwork last week, but I couldn’t find several purchases that Tuesday morning. Yikes! Maybe they were on the bills I left with Jill, the secretary-treasurer, when I met with her the previous night. Jill worked at home for a bank during the day. Would she have time to answer the phone let alone hand the bill to me? Panicked, I called her.

Her calm voice reassured me. “I’ll put the papers in the screen door for you. I got the Berkherhimer tax deposits for you this morning. I’ll include them too.”

After gulping lunch, I gripped the steering wheel and raced across County Line Road. My eyes scanned for state troopers and leaping deer. I turned onto Route 19 then crunched the gravel on Jill’s driveway. Slamming the car door, I hustled up the steps to her side porch, snatched the folder wedged between the screen door and frame, and grabbed the railing to plunge to the stone walkway.

A clucking chorus halted my descent. A turkey, her feathers tucked neatly, and a flock of hens strutted to the porch. The two roosters, that Jill warned me got aggressive, and the tom turkey must have stayed by the coop fifty yards away. The vocal birds stopped strutting but continued their serenade. 

In awe, I crept down the stairs and edged to the car. “Hey, ladies. Nice to see you too.”

They followed me on the grass by the path, across the gravel, and surrounded the Subaru. 

“Careful now. Stay clear of the car.” Wondering if one would flutter inside the front seat with me, I opened the door. “You don’t want to get smooshed.” When I started the engine, the turkey led the hens across the field. I gazed in wonder at the disappearing cluckers. They not only helped me put down the glass of stress, they emptied it. 

Turkey

Humming along with a CD of soothing Japanese folk tunes played on a koto, I drove back to the church. I didn’t need to watch for state troopers.

Glass of stress raised aloft

Turkey and hens cleared right off

Later that afternoon, Kathy, a neighbor and township supervisor, called. “Jill said yinz needed paperwork for the truck license. I drove to Michelle Brooks’s office in Greenville and got it.” Kathy panted as if she’d run part way. “It’s only a copy of the check and a letter explaining the expense. Is that good enough?”

“That’s perfect, Kathy. Thank you. I appreciate you making the extra trip.”

“Well,” her voice had a blush in it, “not everyone is so easy to please.”

“Being a supervisor has to be stressful with people complaining all the time.”

“Heck yeah,” her voice came through the phone line as a shout. We exchanged stressy work stories until I shared Doris’s glass of water email.

“You know, I try to do that,” Kathy said. “I relax with a movie or something else at night. But sure enough, I wake at three fretting about someone’s complaint.”

That evening, I decided to use the first half of Kathy’s routine. I snuggled under my princess blanket to watch Love by Accident. Then I fell asleep dreaming of Daphne and William pretending to date leading to real dating in the rom-com. 

Glass of stress raised aloft

Kathy’s evening movie cleared right off

Unfortunately, I adopted Kathy’s whole routine. At three o’clock I woke with my mind searching through the township’s credit card bills. And the waking up moments increased in frequency. My glass of water seemed to be a gallon jug. I scribbled notes on these”alarming” issues and took them to Jill the following Friday evening. 

She and her American Leopard Hound Rocky met me at the screen door. She smiled and stepped back. He wagged his tail and wriggled his brindled body. We gathered at the round dining room table—the computer by Jill, the file boxes by me, and Rocky stretched between us on the floor. Together we fixed miscoded expenditures and resolved item after item on the night-bothering list. Her comments, “Anyone can make mistakes,” “the credit card bills are so confusing,” and “I’m learning so much from doing the audit,” gave a brighter perspective to the paperwork strewn before us.

Midway through the evening, she walked to the kitchen. A clink-clink of ice cubes dropping into an empty glass woke Rocky. He trotted off to chomp on a cube. Setting a glass of water on the table for me, Jill provided a physical reminder to put down stress. I hadn’t needed that cue. The warm welcome she and Rocky had given plus the positive attitude toward the audit had already lowered my stress.

Glass of stress raised aloft

Jill and Rocky cleared right off

A week after Doris had sent the stress managing email, I returned to the church with every document in place and every transaction checked. The township books should balance. But our total differed from the bank’s by nearly four thousand dollars. Illogical. Frustrating. Nail biting. Contemplating pulling our hair out, we auditors pondered why it was fashionable for men to go bald but not women. I couldn’t put the stress glass down.

Scanning the ledgers for the umpteenth time that afternoon, Sandi yelled, “I found it.”

The ledger listed and expense twice, but Jill had paid it once. We tossed rulers into the air, pumped fists, and stamped feet. A similar error drew us even closer—but auditing isn’t a game of horseshoes.

March 1, we checked through the ledgers for the fifth time with no progress. Over lunch break, I spooned in chicken barley soup and called Jill. “Would you have time to email a pdf of another trial balance with the duplicate items removed? That might help us narrow it down.”

“Sure.” Her confident voice raised my hopes. “I had to make a cash deposit for the sale of the scraper at the bank. I’m driving home right now. I’ll email the balance sheet as soon as I get back.”

With Jill’s report in hand I met the other two auditors. Their faces drooped. Sandi shrugged off her coat, grabbed a file from the boxes, and searched yet again. Carol slumped into her chair and asked, “What do you suggest now?”

“Jill emailed a new trial balance.” I handed the papers to Carol. “Let’s start with the bank accounts. Heaven knows we checked the code totals enough times.”

Carol called off numbers.

I stared at our totals for bank reconciliations in my notebook. “Check . . . check . . . WAIT! What was that last one?”

Sandi set down her folder. Carol straightened in her chair and repeated the number. I threw my notebook into the air. “The general banking account is off!”

Normally that event would cause auditors apprehension.

With joyful hearts, however, we whipped out our calculators, decided we needed to find $147.49. A half hour search later, we found the culprit. One of five online fourth quarter debits hadn’t been listed in the ledger until January. The amount? Exactly $147.49. We had balanced the books to the penny.

Carol’s shoulders lowered. She smiled in relief. 

Sandi and I wiggled our fannies and whooped.

Glass of stress raised aloft

Balancing to the penny cleared right off

I’d wiggled and whooped the final stress away. That night, tucked under a warm flannel sheet, fleece blanket, and log cabin quilt, I drifted into a deep, peaceful sleep until 4:30 a.m. No ledger lines, no dollar amounts, no document search disturbed me. I just had to pee.

Doris gets the credit. She made the difference by sharing the parable. Raising and lowering that proverbial glass of stress, like performing dumbbell overhead presses, taught me a lesson I can apply to township audits in years ahead—even if the stress feels like a rain barrel of water. And I have eleven months of the lowered glass to relish.

Balanced to the Penny

 

 Reflections - A Stressful Process

The Monkey in the Room

“I feel like the monkey in the room again,” Carol said, her face ashen and shoulders slumped. She pointed a long slender index finger at her head. “It’s not sinking in.”

Five years earlier I had been the monkey in the room. Crowded around the small kitchen table in Nancy’s old farm house, I added columns of figures with no idea of what they meant. Nancy stood at the end of the table, took my totals, and pulled all-nighters to turn in final French Creek Township audit reports.

In my fourth year of auditing, Nancy showed signs of confusion and asked for my help. That gave me some insight into the process. But Nancy’s rapid decline and unexpected death left me in charge. Carol and I took auditor training. I assured the supervisors we could do the audit. As a result Carol, with only two years doing the meaningless adding, and I worked with Nancy’s replacement, Sandi. We made a pact. No all-nighters. And working every step together, the three of us successfully completed the 2021 audit.

This February, we gathered again in the room for Vacation Bible School at the Milledgeville Presbyterian Church to do the 2022 township audit. The ten commandments were written on the chalkboard. Rulers, pens, post it notes, and papers for balancing the state funds were spread over the table.

The first Thursday of the audit I attempted to assure Carol that she added value to our effort. “We’re a team. Everyone brings strengths.” I shuffled through the November checking account statement. “Yours is organizing. Your color coding makes us more efficient.”

“What’s getting me is the reports are organized differently this year.” Sandi made a left-handed check mark. “It would be easier to find things if the reports were organized like last year’s.”

“Jill’s new. She has her own way of doing things.” I bit my lip. I should have agreed with Sandi instead of trying to reason her feelings away. She had a valid point. In our township, no two audits are alike. This gave me the advantage. As a former teacher, I’m used to exploring and making mistakes—that’s how we encourage elementary school students to learn. Those techniques horrified Sandi and Carol. Both former nurses, they expected to learn one way of doing things. Patients could suffer or die if nurses made mistakes. 

Keeping to the pact that Carol and I made when Nancy died, we verified transactions and balanced accounts in every detail—together. I hoped to retire, leaving Carol and Sandi qualified to balance the books so the township wouldn’t have to hire expensive public auditors.

But the process stressed me. The first two nights of the audit I woke hourly. Other nights I dreamed of holding a ruler under ledger lines. My stomach continually clenched as if I were straining to maintain the yoga boat pose. And I wrote about auditing in my morning journal searching for a way to keep the team together and focused.

Friday morning as I scribbled at my secretary desk, Ande jumped up beside me. Purring, he plopped his bottom on the left side of the composition notebook. He rested his front paws on the laptop keyboard.

Stalled over how to express the next thought, I jiggled the mouse to switch from the email tab to AccuWeather on the computer. I’d figure out what to wear then before writing more.

The computer didn’t respond.

I pressed my finger on the touch screen tab.

Still nothing.

Ande must have been pressing a key that blocked my access.

Still wondering what to wear, I shouted to the resident weather expert in the great room. “What’s the temperature going to be today, Spence?”

“Upper fifties, I think.”

“Thanks.” Ending my diversion, I concluded there was no way to reason Carol out of her feelings, but I might divert her into releasing some tension. Maybe I could get her to celebrate little successes like I did. The time we matched our state expenditures to the penny with Jill’s state report, for example, I wiggled my fanny, pumped my fists, and yelled woo-hoo. Carol and Sandi had exchanged tolerant smiles. If Carol would let out a whoop now and then, she might feel more relaxed about auditing.

Feeling pleased with my idea, I glanced over at Ande.

He was calmly observing a video of a bald eagle on the computer screen. Beak tucked under its wings, the back of the sleeping bird’s white head rose and fell among dark brown feathers. The video appeared courtesy of the Big Bear Bald Eagle Nest live cam in California.

Ande Observing the Bald Eagle

I had opened tabs for Gmail, Google Drive, and my farm journal on the computer. How did Ande select a bald eagle out of over a billion websites?

As soon as the auditors scraped their chairs into place around the table Friday, I blurted, “I’ve got a story to tell about what my cat Ande did today.

The two put their pens down and faced me. When I finished, Sandi smiled politely, but Carol squealed and clapped her hands. She wiped a slender finger under her eye and her rosy complexion lasted midway through a morning of verifying amounts of bills with numbers written on the general ledger.

She returned from our lunch break and said in a bubbling voice, “I told my husband about your cat. He laughed and laughed.” Carol slapped her thigh. “If you put a video of that on the internet, you’d get thousands of hits.”

The story of Ande’s eagle got Carol through auditing Friday.

Laughs came less frequently Monday. We tackled the credit card bills—Carol glaring at ledgers, Sandi inspecting bank statements, and me sifting through months of stapled bills. Starting with January seemed logical but proved disastrous.

“This makes no sense.” Carol slammed her pen on the ledger. “Why did they change credit card companies?”

“Damnation! The paperwork is worse than last year.” Sandi rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Sorry, Lord. I shouldn’t have said that in church.”

“It’s a new company and two people use the account this year, not one.” I flipped through the crumpled strips looking yet again for the January documents. “The old card belonged to Zina. Since she no longer works for us, we can’t keep using her card.” That fact satisfied the two auditors momentarily. Neither wanted to deal with the notorious past secretary who wrote fictitious reports.

I’d flipped through the bills long enough to realize that the January statement was missing. I would ask Jill to email us a copy. “Let’s look for the February charges and come back to January.” We managed to account for transactions in three months before my co-workers grew uneasy.

“This is taking a lot of time,” Carol said.

“It would make more sense to keep things the same.” Sandi grumbled. “Sorry. I’m venting.”

“Vent all you want.” They had expressed my feelings. “Get it all out.”

Carol and Sandi sang a nonsensical duet, stamped their feet, and grinned ear to ear. Then they dissolved into laughter that rang like pealing church bells.

Carol sighed. “Could we get a list of just the credit card transactions so I don’t have to flip through the whole ledger?”

 

Sandi closed the bank statements. “In the meantime we could work on general revenues.”

“Done.” I stuffed the credit card bills into a folder. “I’ll email Jill during our lunch break.”

After lunch, Carol straightened taller in her chair. “I’ve got something to tell you, Janet.” She paused as if swallowing a tablespoon of dill pickle juice. “I’m not understanding this.” She waved her hand at the plastic tote boxes holding the township folders. “I should know more by now. I’ve prayed to God.” She paused once more—as if praying. “I got my answer this weekend. I’m not running for auditor again. I could never do your job.”

Sandi flashed Carol an indulgent smile. “I can take over, but I’m not ready yet. So Janet has to run for re-election this year.”

Good grief! Running for election meant collecting signatures from registered Democrats in a township populated by Republicans. Besides having wanted to retire after my six year term, the thought of knocking on strangers’ doors to ask them to sign my petition gave me the willies.

At home, I vented.

Charlie waved his arms. “Don’t do it! You don’t like the work. You don’t need the money.”

“I never took the job for the money. I do it as a civic duty.”

“Of course, she’ll run. She complains but she’s venting.” Spence picked up Ande and put him in my arms. “I’ll help you get signatures.”

Petting the cat, I reflected on the stressful job of resolving messes—the auditors did pull together to get every detail right.

Ande nuzzled my neck.

If he could find an eagle on the world wide web, surely I could find at least ten Democrats in the township—even if circulating petitions made me feel like the monkey in the room.

 

Petition without Signatures