“Hey Phil, I heard you’re thinking about putting in a pond back here. Maybe turning those caves over there into a waterfall,” Derek says. He lights a cigarette and points with its glowing tip.

We’re sitting in my backyard with Bev and Marley Ann, sipping cocktails and listening to crickets and cicadas outperform Jerry Garcia, enjoying one of those impromptu happy hours that makes summer summer.

“Where’d you hear that?” I ask, glancing at Bev who evades me by following Derek’s gesture toward the rock wall known to us as The Caves.

I say known to us meaning known also to the flourishing tribe of Tamias inhabiting the wall. Of course, the chipmunks have their own phonemes for home sweet home that sound something like a long trill and a cluck, not to be confused with the rapid trill and cluck they line up to chant each morning, dutifully facing east, from the crack of dawn until the sun has risen and I’m wide awake…

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