By KAREN MADORIN
One of my favorite childhood memories or perhaps adult memories involves using a bright light to cast finger shadows of rabbits, birds, and other creatures onto a blank wall. One morning years ago, I noticed Mother Nature playing her own shadow games on Big Creek below my kitchen window. These engaging and active silhouettes encouraged me to pay close attention to fun the “old girl” could concoct using barren branches, agile squirrels, and flitting birds.
A number of factors played into this ethereal extravaganza. First of all, water filled the creek that winter, providing a surface that reflected dozens of scampering critters in the overhead branches at any one time. Also, the creek hadn’t frozen for long periods due to unseasonably warm temperatures. This sharpened mirror-like effects on the slow-moving water. Next, the red line on the thermometer recorded mornings chilly enough to invigorate squirrels and birds, but not so cold it forced them into huddled energy preservation mode.
Another bonus was unnaturally clear air—no fog, no mist, no moisture of any kind obscured reflections. Finally, weekends provided time to be home around 8:30 a.m. when the rising sun popped over the hill in just the right spot to project a myriad of cottonwood, ash, and locust shadows onto our winding brook.
What I saw when I gazed out the window onto Big Creek was a most unusual circus. Instead of actual critters, I viewed shadows of furry, acrobatic figures chasing one another from one silhouetted high branch to another up and down the bank. The inconsequential forms appeared to fly as they leapt across open space. I suspect that previous spring’s tornado created greater gaps than the squirrels were used to based on the stretches their images made as they vaulted from one landing zone to another.
Amazingly, those breaches didn’t faze the furry acrobats as they launched wiry forms from limb to limb across death-defying spans. The fearless rodents blasted off across open territory with the fearlessness of Flying Wallendas.
Every now and then I spied one of the reflections performing a flip or winding itself artfully around a branch like it wanted to enhance its routine into something exotic. Working in tandem, several choreographed a chase scene that rivaled Steve McQueen’s in The Thomas Crown Affair. In addition to fury critters’ mirrored dives, leaps, twirls, shadows of big and little birds hovered and darted in and out of the darkly profiled scenes. Where to look first became that morning’s challenge. Who cared about coffee?
I don’t know how I’d missed this show on previous weekend mornings. Perhaps that year’s presentation had more to do with earlier mentioned factors—unnaturally warm temperatures and lack of moisture in the air that provided clarity we normally didn’t experience most winter mornings. Whatever the reasons, I recorded this shadow play in my memory banks so I can now sit back and smile at the memory of frisky squirrels turning somersaults in my mind. What a joy to relive that moment!