Riri the squirrel stands on her hind legs when I fail in my peanut dispensing duties. "What’s wrong with you?" she seems to say.

Riri expects me to dispense peanuts with the dependability of a vending machine. Except she doesn’t fork over any coins. The glimpse of the red-spotted rear paws that distinguish her from most of the other garden squirrels should be my reward. 

She is the boldest of my squirrels, firmly wrapping her teeth around the nut I extend from between the tips of my fingers. Then, she scurries away to eat or bury each nut, then returns eagerly for another. There seems to be no limit to her appetite, I wonder if she would eat until she exploded.

Ready Freddie, who used to accept peanuts from my fingers, like Riri, regressed while I was in Paris. Now she quivers and backs off, instead of launching forward for my handout. Or maybe she’s figured out that I have a soft spot for her, so she can extract nuts from me without placing herself in dangerous proximity to my mammoth human body.