I shouldn’t have blamed the cat, I admit that. Throwing her out on the porch with harsh words and strongly expressed sentiments was wrong.

I actually told her she was as bad as the puppy, something I had to retract immediately. Mindful as I am of how easily cats can make it seem like it’s always someone else’s fault, she could never be as bad as the puppy.

The transgression was that, when pup and I returned to the house after clearing one of our larger recent storms, I found the piece of fiberglass insulation that stuffs the old fireplace flue down on the bricks behind the woodstove, creating a mess. She was the obvious culprit.

I had worked hard on the snow and was looking forward to the rest of the day as mine. Just mine. And here was a mess – more work.

I stuffed the fiberglass back and turned to get the vacuum when I heard the moaning. As all the members of my household were accounted for, it had to be an intruder. In the chimney. A squirrel, I guessed, as unhappy to be there as I was to discover it. It kept moaning. Loudly.

There was only one way into the chimney – through the hole at the top and down the smooth-sided steel liner pipe. There was only one way out – by falling into the living room, same as the insulation.

I had horrors of the squirrel delaying his arrival to the middle of the night. I decided to block the Franklin fireplace with hardware cloth, and inside that space I would put a small, peanut-butter-baited Have-A-Hart trap. I needed a piece of hardware cloth three feet tall, and could only find a two-foot piece. Using my superior human reasoning – a faculty nonexistent in squirrels – I decided that would be fine. The squirrel would drop to the bricks and wouldn’t want to jump out over the hot stove anyway.

I quietly set up my capture, evacuated the pets, and left the squirrel for a while – to no result. Next I tried banging on the stove pipe that went in above the squirrel’s new lair, and I heard him plop down. Perfect! But then the fun began. Taking no notice of the Have-A-Hart and the delectable peanut butter, the squirrel was in the living room in one leap.

Whoever coined the phrase “bouncing off the walls” must have had a squirrel in the house.

This guy zinged from one wall to the other, over chairs, knocking things off shelves, under tables. I grabbed a broom and opened the back door. He wasn’t interested in the back door, and I couldn’t herd him there. I raced to the front window where he had already crash-landed a couple of times and scrabbled to unlock it, throw up the sash and wrench out the screen.

Then behind me, it was suddenly silent. I looked around, under the table, on the kitchen counters – still quiet. Checking the back door, there were squirrel prints in the snow. Thank God for snow.

Putting things back to rights, I reflected on how silly I had been to get worked up over the inconvenience of the squirrel.

Our lives are made up of the things we plan, and the things that just happen to us. It’s mostly the things that just happen to us that make up the stories of our lives.

My story, that day, was about a gray squirrel. Happen, it WAS a two-foot tall, man-eating, rabid gray squirrel that attacked me in my sleep. But that’s my story (I’m selling the concept to Stephen King).

My friend Trina and her husband Darryl had one of those “things that just happen” stories last week, too. They stepped out of their camp into the midst of a small herd of deer. Unafraid, the deer let them wander among them snapping pictures and getting close enough to almost touch them. A blessing, a once-in-a-lifetime story.

These days, weather is happening to all of us, and we share daily our stories of “Snow piles over my head!” and “It’s up to the eaves!” and “Can you believe this winter?”

Elsewhere, other people have stories – their “Caught in traffic two hours” and “Couldn’t find a place to park” and maybe even “Got mugged when I left the ATM” stories. We have snow and deer and squirrels in the chimney. It’s not so bad, is it?