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My chipmunk neighbor appears to be living on her own again. She must have decided that the three children were old enough to go live on their own. One of them tried to come back yesterday to eat some of the sunflower seeds etc. that I had put out, but the mother chased him or her away after a brief rumble.

I drove out to Brimfield today to go to the antiques show. I’d never been there before. The newspaper reports make it sound exquisite, but the merchandise really runs the gamut from the junky to the exquisite, with much of the stuff closer to the junky than to the exquisite. Lots of dealers from all over the U.S. have booths there, most of them under awnings or tents. There are also a number of little booths where one can buy a lunch. For most of the sections of the fair, admission is free. There was one area with somewhat better booths for which the admission was five dollars. I entered that area around two o’clock and at that point I didn’t notice anybody interested in collecting money for admission. If somebody had asked me to pay, I would have, but since nobody asked I didn’t go looking to pay. I spent about two and a half hours at the fair, and then my attention began to wane. I had parked at a three-dollar lot, at St. Christopher’s Catholic church, that wasn’t very far from the fair. Closer lots would have cost $5 or $7. I didn’t buy anything, other than a tuna melt and a cranberry juice, but some of the small Oriental rugs were tempting.

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Today the three little chipmunks are looking out of their hole in the ground. Sometimes they will venture as far as two feet from the hole and then run back. Yesterday only one was venturing away from the hole. According to what I’ve read online, within the next two weeks the mother will either kick them out of her burrow or will move into a new burrow herself. I suspect she’ll kick them out, since she likes sitting on the nearby woodpile to survey the little valley at the back of my yard. Also I give her sunflower seeds, cracked corn, and peanuts every now and then, on the ground to the right of the woodpile, often two or three times a day.

The chipmunk that lives in my back yard has three little chipmunks.

A few miscellaneous travel trips:

1. Do not pack in haste just before leaving on a trip. For my recent trip to New York for a few days, I packed just before leaving. One of the items I packed was a pair of grey flannel trousers. When I got to New York and was putting them on for the evening, I discovered that I had packed a pair so old that it was six inches too small in the waist and impossible for me to wear. Fortunately the black jeans that I had worn on the train could suffice.

2. Do not pack a small container of pasta salad you bought in a grocery store. It may leak olive oil over other things, in my case, fortunately, just the outside of some plastic bottles of water that I had in the same grocery-store bag.

3. It is nice to remember razor blades, but, if forgotten, they can easily be bought in New York.

A crocus has blossomed. I thought that in the past they blossomed in my yard in late February, but I’m not really sure.

All the lights are on in the house next door, and there are no curtains on any of the windows. There used to be curtains. Did the people decide to clean all the curtains at the same time? Have they decided to live without curtains as many people do? Have they moved away? And is the new occupant in the house looking things over? I don’t know.