I have a contemplative chipmunk.
Or rather, living near my house there is either a chipmunk or a family of them prone to striking a contemplative pose and holding it for an inordinate amount of time.
When my wife and I first moved to High Point, in the backyard we found a pretty chunk of gray-and-white-striped granite roughly the size of a human head. My wife moved it to a corner of the back deck. The next morning, she looked out to find a chipmunk perched on top of the rock simply staring out at the yard.
Every morning, the chipmunk returned. And each time, it remained on that perch, not moving, for a long while.
When the weather turned cold, it disappeared, but in the spring it came back — or it and others came back. Sometimes the chipmunk on the rock looks a little smaller than usual. Maybe there is a young chipmunk mimicking a parent’s perching.
Whether there is one or there are more, whether it’s learned or just in the nature of chipmunks, the behavior is the same.
The critter gets up on the rock and just looks across the yard — not unlike the way I sometimes sit in a chair on the deck and look out across the yard, silently staring as my mind wanders. Sometimes I think about yard projects I want to get to, some short-term, some for next summer, or the next. Sometimes I simply wonder at nature, looking up into the trees, the setting sun still lighting the highest leaves stirring in the breeze as the darkness starts to deepen down below. Sometimes I worry about money or work or myriad choices I’ll never be able to undo even if I discovered during my rumination an alternative I would have preferred. Sometimes I just stew.
Sometimes I look at that rock and wonder what the chipmunk thinks as it looks across the yard.
Is it planning lunch?
Thinking about digging a new extension for its burrow?
Wondering whether Mrs. Chipmunk will be feeling frisky later?
Worrying about the neighbor’s cat?
Maybe it’s just absorbing a moment’s peace.
Or perhaps it is just trying to figure out what the big, white-headed beast keeps staring at across the yard, and why it won’t just stay inside its brick cave and leave the deck to its rightful owner.
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