The ghost of Squirrel Nutkin
I was once in a park in A. with a Poet from New Jersey. Two exiles, just like souls always are. Little did I know he was playing at being a five-year old trapped inside a man; I was delirious to have found a soul mate of old.
He had brought a tarpaulin along hoping to relive his youth and do secret shrub-hidden things to me. He ended up reading A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad to me - so that brought me a lot closer to my old home than his debasing grasp at his virility did for him. (The stunning rose above, by the way, is named "a Shropshire Lad").
At that time, I was, in effect, cheating - on my wife -with him. She had wooed me in B. with a mix tape of KD Lang and Joan Armatrading and such, but Jane Sibery was her greatest gift to me (she would revive my Maria mood in 2000 to see everything that is still now here, in for example you and me discovering the truth about our men, children and women). I must have heard her song: "The Squirrel Crossed The Road" in about 1990, but in 1993 I was in that park, at high noon, and a squirrel shot across a very crowded bit of lawn to brand its message into my brain until I might be able to read it. (A red squirrel mind, not your common cheeky grey one).
And eventhough I never had listened to that Sibery song closely (I can save such packets for decades if I must) and only unwrap it today, in response to your post, I knew with all my magical heart that I had to remember this "ribbon on the fence" until I was able to understand why it had crossed my path, lying there in the (quick sand) grass;
to decode the secret to laying a spell over the land and dispelling the searching never stops till you are in a foreign land (smelling like man but not "walking like a man" - oh cruel truth that is knowing what there is to know....)- preferably with a mega raging overdrive that makes you feel alive. But in you I have greatest faith that the nuts we gathered in May ("knots" - of flowers - of course: the song is confused) are what make us sip coke and secretly wish for rain in September.
My mouth is dropped at the magic of our reading :O For, I posted my baby friends in sand and another I/nut tell poem from decades ago only to come here and find you've already spread out the same before I've even come to read!?
So, the squirrels have, and continue to, run their ribbons!