Citizen journal: Hungry squirrel announces its return

Several summers ago, a number of squirrels started coming to our deck for peanuts that I would put out for them.

One squirrel became so tame that she would take a peanut out of my fingers.

If I ignored her, she would hit the sliding glass door with a loud thump with her shoulder to catch my attention.

The next summer, Thumper didn’t appear.

A bit saddened, I assumed that either she had moved on or something had happened to her.

Toward the end of the third summer as I was working in the kitchen one afternoon, I heard an unmistakable bump against the sliding glass door.

There was Thumper, back after a year-and-a-half absence as if she had never left, standing up on her hind legs and peering in at me, waiting to be fed.

I don’t know where she had been all that time.

The marvel of it was that after all that time, the little animal had come back, knew which tree to drop out of to reach our high deck and remembered exactly the special routine she had perfected that had worked so well – “thumping” the sliding glass door to draw my attention.

Thumper had not forgotten.

Nor would I.