On a warm mid-summer day in 2020, I dropped a peanut from the window of my home office, hoping that it would serve as a snack for one of the cute squirrels that lived in the trees and scampered merrily over the lawns in the north Dallas neighborhood where I had lived with my wife Donna for 35 years.
Although I didn’t stick around to watch, a subsequent forensic analysis suggested that the tasty treat was promptly snatched up by one of my fuzzy-tailed friends, who devoured part of it on my property and then ate the rest of it less than five feet away on the driveway of our new neighbor, Sonia Bryant. I know that this happened because the squirrel thoughtlessly left half a peanut shell on Sonia’s driveway.
Sonia spotted this clear evidence of squirrel trespass and did what any of us would have done in the same situation: She called the police.
Dallas PD dispatched a member of the elite Squirrel Squad in the person of a very pleasant policewoman, who told me that there were actually two complaints. First, she had received a report that Donna had blown leaves off Sonia’s driveway. This accusation was undeniable. When Donna had used a leaf blower to clear the leaves from the north side of our property, some of those leaves had drifted onto Sonia’s driveway, so Donna had thoughtfully blown them off our new neighbor’s property as well.
Donna had been doing this for decades, through a series of owners who had preceded Sonia – John, Nelson, and Bill, to be precise. But whereas John, Nelson, and Bill had all appreciated the fact that Donna always tidied up after her work, Sonia had decided that Donna’s blatant neighborliness had risen to the level of a criminal offense.
After the officer explained the leaf-blowing situation to me, she led me to the back of Sonia’s driveway, where she pointed a toe at the remains of the peanut shell that the furry perpetrator had left behind. The officer was preparing to dust the shell for paw prints, but I brought the crime-scene investigation to an abrupt halt by confessing that I had fed the errant peanut to the culprit myself. My defense was that I wasn’t responsible for how the cute little rodent had chosen to dispose of the peanut once it left my possession.
I guess she bought it, because she didn’t cuff me and haul me off to jail, despite my penchant for felonious peanutting.
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