flying squirrels et al.

The stained coffee mug reads, in German: I am the master of the house. Four days of drippings streak its side, evidence of my laziness and unwillingness to spend forty-five seconds each day washing the dishes.
Who is now the master of the house? Certainly not I; a transient I am, here to sit out the terms of my punishment, my mood oscillating between abject woe and patient indifference, too often lured to the TV for a good numbing of the mind. At work at night, my thoughts run wild, the painful images of past loss recycling until I am reduced to tears. At day, during my few hours of leisure, I rebuild my confidence and make the small steps needed to keep this house and my life up and running.
After thirty years of painstaking neglect, the saying may be true about the house, but no one is master of the five other acres of this property. Thick vines run between the treecrowns, building wide epiphytic networks that will eventually pull the host to the ground. The underbrush is thick with thorny and poisonous brush that rends the flesh and causes it to itch. The stream is lost in places to overhanging masses of bamboo and other opportunistic weeds that make empty spaces their home.
A thousand shades of green explode in the sudden sunlight while a million droplets descend through layers of leaves, their passage a wild staccato in a cloudburst's sullen wake. I approach an ancient weathered tree and knock thrice to check its soundness and with a frantic scramble out pops a flying squirrel who climbs ten feet and then stops, flaps of gliding skin loose about his sides, his wide flat tail shuddering slightly in time with his thundering heart. I merge quietly back onto the path and move along the top of the northern ridge, slowing at the sound of furious scolding up ahead, hoping to see the mother owl, and yes, there she is, her wide shadow the only evidence of her passage, and I turn just in time to see her flap into the eaves of a massive oak, harassed as she flies by a handful of smaller, seed-eating birds I recognize from their winter begging.
No, I am not the master of this house, of this land. The beasts are the masters here, living out their lives in this postage stamp of natural bounty, safe from harm by all but each other.

Ultima Ratio Regum.
JP