:  Squirrels in the park are much easier to deal with than the ones who presume to move into your house with you.  It doesn’t matter how long you have lived there, once a squirrel takes up residence, in his mind, you’re a squatter.  Go figure.  When my son was about six years old, we were living in an old house where the upstairs bedrooms had slanted ceilings about halfway up that flattened out to accommodate the floor of a narrow attic that ran down the middle of the house.  Lots of big, old trees grew up close to the house and with the gable windows open, it was cool and breezy upstairs in the summer.  All and all, not a bad spot.  The second year we were there, a family of squirrels took up residence in the attic by gnawing through a corner of the vent that provided access by its timidity with strangers.  By and large, the squirrels weren’t much of a bother - in the beginning.  They had a bunch of younguns in the spring and the patter of little feet over my head gave me cause to wonder if I shouldn’t clean them out of there and repair the vent, but in the end, the summer turned hot that year and I spent more time on the porch thinking about getting out the ladder than I did in making a move towards the shed.  Besides which, there was a sizable family of Daddy-Long-Legs living in the shed that my son liked to play with and I didn’t have the heart to break up his friendships.  He’d go in there and stand in the dusky shadows with his hand up against the rough wood wall, and before you know it, his new buddies would take up the invite and climb off onto him, bouncing on their skinny legs and crowding one against the other for the best spot.  They purely loved the feel of his skin under their feet and it tickled him to have them climb around on him.  I spent that summer drinking tea and easing my lazy ass over to take advantage of the shade, my son played with his friends and grew at least an inch and a half.  While we were about that, the squirrels wrote long heartfelt letters to their relations and invited one and all to come and live at their place.  Friends and neighbors, in the fall, the party began.  Sometime in October, I noticed that the number and timbre of the little feet over my head had surely grown.  They were having a family reunion and partied all day and well into the early evening.  That night, while my son and I were asleep in our beds, the neighbors upstairs decided it was time to clean up after the gathering and take out the trash.  I remember hearing a distant gnawing sound, but I didn’t put it down as meaningful information until my son jumped up out of bed flinging bits of pecan shells and leaves about the room.  I turned on the light to see what was what, but what I saw didn’t set my mind as ease, not one bit.  Just above my son’s bed was a hole - a brand new hole - in the ceiling and out of the hole popped a squirrel head.  No sooner did the squirrel spot me looking at him than he took offense.  Apparently, according to the squirrel - if I read that string of profanity and arm waving correctly - I had no business living in his trash dump and he expected me to apologize and leave the premises right then and there.  He didn’t think much of it when I took a poke at his head with a broomstick, in fact, he stayed up half the night fuming over it, returning to the hole now and then to deliver a fresh set of insults.  About three in the morning I thought of yet another use for duct tape and covered the hole sufficiently to discourage the dumping of any more garbage.  Over the next few weeks, we conducted a daily war wherein the squirrel and his kinfolk chewed a hole in the ceiling and my son and I pounded the hole with the broomstick and taped it over with duct tape.  In my off hours, I cussed the landlord for the cheap pasteboard he tacked up on the ceiling and I cussed the squirrels for being squirrels.  Seemed appropriate at the time.  The ceiling looked like the backside of a minefield. In some places, the squirrels had chewed through the existing duct tape so that strings of detritus hung down with gnawed pecan shells sticking to it.  Along about August, a fella moved in down the street from us who had a lively terrier for a pet and the idea of digging holes in the ceiling began to appeal to me.  Me and my son sawed us a hole big enough to put that dog through it and in next to no time, the squirrel clan made up their minds that our attic was not the happy home they thought it was.  Friends, they were packed and out of there so fast they didn’t have time to leave us a forwarding address.  The duct tape repairs were so ugly that we split for the bucks to put up a couple of sheets of plywood and painted it white, but we left the hole open at one end to put the dog through, just in case some of those boys decided to come back and pay us a visit.