Many years ago a family of chipmunks moved into our house.

Not the house proper, of course; nothing like that. Instead they took residency under the stone-and-concrete walkway leading from the front door out to the attached screened porch.

When we built the house, decades ago, I’d had visions of installing a modest waterway that started in a fountain in the flower garden west of the porch and ran under the walkway to a recirculating pool out on the adjoining terrace, and deliberately left a space beneath the walkway to accommodate the brook.

But I never got around to completing any of it, and after a while the chipmunks took advantage of my sloth and moved into the little underpass, no doubt dragging in plenty of dry grass or moss or whatever striped rodents use for carpeting and uphols

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