It’s homecoming weekend at Tulane University, and the place is already crawling with parents following two steps behind students who seem uncomfortably reminded of their position between child and adulthood.  I weaved through campus on my bicycle until the crowds got to be too much–I didn’t want to hurt anyone–and then walked my bike, greeting students and feeling generally chipper, what with the fall weather and the blue skies (though they’ve now turned gray).  Aside from all the expected bustle of homecoming weekend, I saw this squirrel leaping through the grass.  And that’s how squirrels move here–they leap, in a bouncy kind of way, searching for nuts, I suppose.  Squirrels have taken up a good deal of space in all the places I’ve lived, and they don’t always look the same.  I remember in particular the tiny leaping blackish squirrels in Hartford, Connecticut.  They pranced through Trinity College’s campus.  Or the very aggressive giant squirrels at UC Berkeley.  They’d come right up to you and ask for half your sandwich.  Squirrels live here just as much as any of us, but their world is so much different, right?  And we barely notice them.  I’m not sure why I was struck by this today in particular.  But as I made my way through campus I thought about how there are so many of us, moving through the same space for different reasons, certainly with different thoughts hamstering around in our heads.  That’s surely something, but at the same time, there’s a whole world happening, unnoticed, right under our feet.