The show has expanded since we last spoke. It now includes about 7 squirrels, 4 doves, 2 crows, an assortment of songbirds, and a mallard duck. I know! Makes me remember Our Gang of yesteryear. Perhaps I'll call it the Squirrel Soliel and charge admission to the kids on the street.
"You seem..." said a voice from backstage.
"Aiiieee!" I said, shooting into the air about four inches and spilling my coffee. With my attention intensely focused on the act currently occupying the big top, I was not prepared for disembodied voices from outside my head.
"Sorry," said Ms. Wonder for it was she who had silently streamed into my presence.
"Is something troubling you," she said. "You seem unusually agitated this morning."
"It's nothing much," I said. "Just one damned thing after another is all."
"But just one thing at the moment?" she said.
"Nothing major," I said, "I'm just wondering about something that happened on my walk this morning."
"Do tell," she said.
"OK," I said. "Underneath one of the pines in the open savannah..."
"Longleaf pines," she said.
"Someone had collected several pine cones and placed them in the grass. Don't ask," I said, "because I have no idea."
She sipped her own cuppa without responding. I felt it was safe to continue, so I did.
"It seemed bad feng shui," I said, "so I picked up a handful and tossed it back onto the pine straw near the base of the tree."
She nodded. I continued.
"I immediately noticed that my forearms were covered in a fine, brown dust, similar in color to the pine cones and so I assumed that the little specs on my arms came from."
"Makes sense," she said.
"But when I got back to my car and began cleaning the dust off my arms, I realized that the stuff was all over my shirt too. It seemed far too much to have come from pine cones."
I waited for her comment but it was another bust. No reply.
"And so I began to wonder if something was blowing around in the air. I remembered a movie about some interstellar dust that fell on a small community in the Everglades--a cloud of dust that was actually spores bringing alien life to Earth."
"And?" she said.
"And I began wondering if I'm pregnant."
"I see," she said, "and so you think you may possibly be the agent responsible for altering life on Earth as we know it forever. And you're going to let one little thing ruin your day?"
"Well, when you put it like that it really doesn't seem like a big deal," I said.
At that moment, she must have gotten a text message from her employer because she quickly left the lanai and she hasn't yet returned. Perhaps I should make an appointment with my primary physician just to be safe.