I spent the week visiting my parents at their retirement home “up north,” and so I got to see them and my mother’s outside pet, Stubby, the red squirrel. I hadn’t seen Stubby since last winter, when he had made an elaborate network of tunnels in the deep snow outside my parents’ window facing the lake. My mother fed him on the ground beneath the bird feeder, and Stubby would pop out of one of his several tunnel entrances to eat, then pop into his tunnel and emerge on the other side. He occasionally had some red squirrel visitors. I named one Evald, after a great-uncle, and my mother named the second one Sigfrid, after another of her uncles. But the squirrel visitors were just that -- they stayed for a short time, enjoyed Stubby’s handouts and left, leaving Stubby alone with my parents.
