And now for a funny short story from home:
My mothership has a pet chipmunk. He’s not a pet in the sense that he sits in a cage in the house and runs on a wheel or plows around the living room in a clear plastic ball. He’s an outdoor pet and he lives, for the most part, by his own means.
He popped up five years or so ago, a little brown chipmunk with a racing stripe on its back. My mom found him nosing around her garden. She says he appeared shortly after I moved away. He was nibbling on sunflower seeds and millet in her bird feeders, which explained why her feeders were mysteriously losing seeds within hours of filling them.
Rather than shoo him away, my mothership, the patron saint of woodland creatures, stray cats, one-eyed bunnies, wayward frogs and ailing birds, started filling the feeders with extra seeds and extra millet. And the chipmunk that she had so cleverly named Chippy did not protest.