by Peggy Robin
Ever since the forced departure of John Kelly from the Washington Post --which was, for me, the most painful in a series of deep cuts to the paper, worse than the loss of the Sunday Outlook opinion section, the KidsPost, the Washington Post Magazine & Date Lab, the Style Invitational, or the Skywatch astronomy column -- I've been quietly mourning an absent friend.
Of course I'll miss my old friend's profiles of local characters, quirky stories of rings lost and found, his various adventures and misadventures with His Lovely Wife, tales of misbehavior by the dogs in his life, and so many other charming little anecdotes of life in the Nation's Capital (OK, not IN it but near it, as he's a suburbanite) that made up the substance of his five-day-a-week columns. But there is one thing that I will miss more than anything else, and that's his love of squirrels, which I share. And the highest expression of that love for our furry little neighbors in the trees was his annual Squirrel Week. For five glorious days in April, he would give over the whole of his column over to those entertaining and often infuriating but talented, acrobatic rodents. And the high point of the week was the finale, the winners of the Squirrel Photo contest.
If you don't immediately understand what I mean, just look at his last column of the best photos of Squirrel Week 2023 (4/12/2023):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/04/12/squirrel-photography-contest/ (By the way, my favorite of that lot was photo #12, the one of the Squirrel and the Robin. Can you guess why?)
Sadly, there will be no more Squirrel Week, no more Best Squirrel Pix of 2024 to look forward to in the spring. I was reminded of that earlier today when I wandered over to the Social Media Site Formerly Known As Twitter (SoMeSiFKAsTwit -- see NOTE*) and was struck by a particularly beatific photo tweet of a squirrel in winter: https://twitter.com/Conthescene/status/1758609012654825638
Wouldn't this little guy have been perfect for John Kelly's Squirrel Week phonto contest? It's by a local photographer who posts a lot of pix of wildlife and other scenic shots in DC and environs. Follow C on the Scene @Conthescene if you like what you see.
Please feel free to share any good shots you've captured of squirrels or any other photogenic animals on the Cleveland Park Listserv. Be sure to keep them within the technical limits of our display capacity on the Groups.io platform: .JPG format only, no more than 500 KB in size (that's 0.5 MB). No more than 4 photos in a single message, and the 500 KB limit is the maximum size of all photos combined.
The Listserv will never be a substitute for John Kelly's Squirrel Week, but we do give out our own prize -- a Cleveland Park Listy --at the end of the year for the Best Photo of the Year. The 2023 Best Picture Listy went to a photo of a woodpecker. Could the 2024 Listy go to a squirrel?
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* NOTE: I have sworn an oath never to accede to the whims of the current owner of that social media platform by calling it "X". That's not a business name; it's a mark made by an illiterate person, or a way to signify that the content is obscene.
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Still Life with Robin is posted on the Cleveland Park Listserv and on All Life Is Local on Saturdays
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