Andrea Masciari

I held my breath all spring while the apple tree replaced its flowers with tiny golden delicious apples and the apricots began to plump up enough to ripen to their glorious amber red.  The squirrels continuously stood guard, waiting for the right moment to pounce upon our apples and apricots and peaches and plums, harvesting the premature budding crop for their insatiable appetites for homegrown fruit.  These fuzzy, gray misers live in nearby trees and under the eaves of a neighboring house, with all the comforts of hearth and home beckoning to them from our tiny backyard garden.  After several years of losing battles between rodent and human, my crazed husband chased a squirrel out of the peach tree.  The squirrel ran for his life, across the fence, onto a tree and finally, his tiny heart pounding, crouched on top of our handmade birdhouse.  He stared down at the builder of the birdhouse and gnawed profusely on his unripened treasure, chanting, I’m certain of it, “You can’t catch me.  You can’t catch me.” With blood pressure high and head hanging low, a disgusted man, not usually small in stature, threw his hands in the air and gave up.

So I found a recipe on the Web for a cayenne pepper concoction that was supposed to saturate the little buggers’ paws and burn their mouths when they ate the coveted fruit.  Nothing fatal or permanently injurious – just a little zing, a punishment, if you will, for stealing something that belongs to me.  The first rain, and the second and third, proved to render the maintenance of such a deterrent too much for me to sustain.  As the torrential downpours washed the pepper goo into the ground, the squirrels happily pranced around our backyard with the nectar of the gods dripping from their freeloading, parasitic little faces.

Last year we tried bird netting.  Mind you, we don’t have a problem with birds.  In fact, we’d be willing to share some of our fruit with sparrows and bluejays and cardinals.  The gnaw-proof black netting was intended to keep the squirrels at bay, virtually impossible for them to find their way to the bursting fruit.  It seemed to be working for a while, but I noticed the fruit’s stunted growth and small black spots on the apricots’ delicate skins.  But we kept that netting bound tight, checking each day for gaps in the netting’s closures and rejoined them together.  Tons of ugly string ties feathered the net and tree.  Finally, we beat those rogues at this game, or so we thought.  They’d have to find something else to eat, like, say, acorns.  Then one beautiful summer morning I found a squirrel cheerily munching on a black and green apricot.  With only six pieces of fruit left on the tree, I tore down the net and walked to the supermarket for a pound of California apricots for two dollars and ninety-nine cents.

After several futile attempts at various kinds of deterrents, we had just about given up.  “Not so fast,” asserted the repellent specialist at a nearby nursery, assuring us that fox urine would do the trick.  After all, the fox is a squirrel’s natural enemy, its predator, and its evil foe.  Well, even after my husband voiced his doubts because our squirrels are “city squirrels and they don’t know they’re supposed to be afraid of foxes,” we set up a series of five or six plastic bottles of the putrid stuff.  Lo and behold, a lone squirrel, a scout of sorts, probably looking to see if we were serious about this or just humoring him and his cohorts, jumped right over one of the vials hanging on the fence.   He then jumped into the apple tree, over the squirrel-eaten blueberry bush and into the apricot tree.  This isn’t funny anymore.  Perhaps it will be one day as we sip on a cool glass of Chardonnay from a cabin in the remote wilderness of Alaska.  I can deal with moose.  At least moose offer strange magical beauty and an imposing dose of otherworldliness.  They slowly, yet gently, crush everything in their path, but they don’t, as far as I know, climb apricot trees.

Goodbye Daniel Butler School – a wonderful structure of learning and friendship. So much of childhood spent within its happy rooms, lovingly sustained by the caring educators and staff who enter the wooden doors every day to bring to each waiting child, a sense of timelessness and belonging and place. The Butler School is an institution of academic learning, but it is so much more than that. It is a community as diverse as the world is large, and my family, privileged participants in the generosity of this diversity in the midst of our otherwise, sometimes intolerant world. With over 26 languages spoken during our years at the Butler school, our home has been filled with the speakers of those words. Some of our more boisterous gatherings have included children from over twelve countries at a time, bringing with them their cultures and their beautiful hearts and minds. Sadly, many return to their much-loved homelands, taking their voices with them. But they always leave a part of themselves with us, and we hold onto them in letters, in phone calls and with immeasurable heartfelt memories. I hope we are with them too.

Now it is time, after our final phase of elementary school, to enter the real world that life has to offer. All things, good and bad, will infiltrate the lives of our children as reality opens its doors to their innocent expectations. We’ll have to guide them through thick and thin without benefit of compassionate grade school teachers and a principal who knows the names of every child’s siblings, and I hope we will succeed. I hope we will look back, in retrospect, and recall these glory days of impressive art projects gracing the walls of our little school and those of the Sovereign Bank on Concord Ave. I for one will close my eyes on difficult days and hear the musical assemblies that bring tears to the eyes of people like me. Tears of pride for a music teacher who can gather together, seemingly without effort, over 100 children and produce a heart-wrenching hour of simple harmony among those faces of color and character and youth. All with the same smiles of joy in the pride they feel for the school they love so much.

We’ll celebrate our Fourth Grade Moving On Ceremony with speeches of gratitude and loud rounds of applause for the special people who make the Butler School a hidden gem tucked out of the way of the mainstream. The children will play games and give hugs to those who have led them through the rigors of MCAS as well as the comedies and tragedies of childhood in America in the twenty-first century. Their childhood – marred by the ignorance of terrorism and the scariness of monsters lurking in the darkest corners of our beloved country. There exists a sense of hopelessness, sometimes, in the hearts of the parents who must bear witness to and give refuge from the horror of it all.

Oh, how I wish time could stand still for this moment just before our children say goodbye to their comrades. I wish time could give back to us snapshots of our little boys and girls in perfect parallel against the playground wall for the very first time – crisp new backpacks and spanking white sneakers ready and willing to explore this new world of theirs. I see my two young boys reaching for the stars and grasping in their outstretched minds, a love of learning and of life itself. And I hope that peace will find them all in their journey through life, in love, in ecstasy.

I remember the preying mantis on my schoolhouse windowsill, its awesome presence imbedded in my distant first-grade memories. I remember the penny my best girlfriend and I buried in the schoolyard dirt, a symbol of our undying friendship. And I recall, when I close my eyes real tight, how it feels to leave the past behind. Our children will remember too, and I suspect they will always know that the doors that opened up for them at the Daniel Butler School, will one day welcome their children into its friendly halls filled with music and art and joy.