Warm thoughts may require refrigeration

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 …