Working outside has been growing on me. There is a small wooden table outside McCabe Library, with a single anciently strong wooden chair, alongside two small stone “benches” protecting a garden. The benches are layered, made up of the same stones as the paths which are built on campus—it seems like they had some left over, and they decided to make the plaza outside McCabe a tiny little brutalist sculpture garden.

I (not an English/sociology major) have been talking to some of that strange breed to learn their habits. An interesting behavior of some is that they evidently keep notes; they take what they see and how they feel, and use it as a basis for medium-length nonfiction writing. They take their experiences and distill them into a well-edited personal essay, like the philosophers of old. Journaling is common enough, but writing down your thoughts and coming back to them later to make something actually worth reading is something I hadn’t even thought of as a possibility before arriving here. It makes the thoughts you have on an issue much more clear; there is nothing to enhance the clarity of opinions like being forced to articulate them. Perhaps, one day, they can be published as collections. They write about finding what is special in the ordinary, what they are passionate about, and so I will write about something I am passionate about—squirrels.

I was sitting outside of McCabe, working on, ironically, a blog post (stay tuned for a post about the student-made musical, Ashes of Fate). As I was having a sort of standoff with my own work, a small squirrel came over to the bench. It came much closer to me than any other had before; it came within about two feet of my chair. It wasn’t expecting a treat from me (we’re pretty good about not feeding the squirrels), and so it was rummaging around, completely unaware of my presence. It was small—probably a juvenile who had just left the nest. It wandered clumsily, back legs low to the ground, more ambling than walking, feet splayed wide. Just a thoroughly amusing animal.

Despite not going to Haverford (their mascot is the Black Squirrel), I love squirrels. My friends all know this. (I frequently talk about how much I adore them, to the point that it has become a joke that I know every squirrel individually. Oh, that’s Gerald.) They have an endearing quality that is hard to pin down, but they are smart, cunning, and above all else, adorable. Seeing a squirrel anywhere is a treat for me; as you may imagine, going to cities is a big deal. Luckily for me, they are everywhere in Swarthmore. On the quarter-mile walk from my dormitory to the dining hall, I can expect to see ten or so at any time of the year, but in the spring, their population explodes. They’re everywhere, chittering, scurrying, making morning’s stillness into a tiny cacophony.

However, there’s something particularly amusing about the squirrels of Swarthmore. After some critical thinking (helped by the process of writing, just like the English majors said), I think it has to do with the contrast they provide to the usual Swarthmore landscape. Our grounds are beautiful, as I occasionally feel the need to randomly comment on. The trees line walkways, the flowers jut out ever so slightly into the seating area to give one a sense of being encompassed by nature, and every bench is perfectly in place. The squirrels offer a contrast. They are a force of nature, designed for naught but chaos. They take their food from the manicured beds, both disturbing the look of perfection and making it even more perfect—making it lived in. In that way, they are like the students—running amok in this beautiful campus, scrounging and surviving and thriving by the skin of our teeth, alongside everyone else—clever, shrewd, and more than a little comedic.

I saw a squirrel fall out of a tree in a manner most undignified, standing on the ground, shell-shocked, for a moment before attempting to run away like nothing had happened, and climbing a tree with incredible deftness and ease. I saw a student, working on what I believe was an algebraic topology problem, attempt to open a packet of soy sauce by squeezing, at which point it came out the other end onto the floor.

I hope the squirrel is okay. I think the student will be.