“Where are you going?” I asked a squirrel last month as it cautiously crossed to my side of the street, then scampered between the two houses toward our backyards.

That squirrel didn’t reply as it ran between the houses, and I lost sight of it while standing at my front screen door.

For years there were squirrels living in a big tree across the street, but I hadn’t seen them recently when I looked outside each morning. But I did recently unearth an almost empty pecan shell in the flowerbed.

Right after our recent rains there was movement on the ground across the street near another large tree. It was birds. They had their heads down getting worms when I saw a squirrel run past them, and up into a pecan tree.

I laughed at the irony of squirrels making their home there.

Then I recalled many years ago when squirrels ate their way through wood siding on our house. A family of two, or more, had set up housekeeping in the attic located right over our bedroom. Their early- morning in and out races weren’t helpful to our sleep after late nights putting the newspaper to bed.

We slept much better after they left (but not under their own volition).

Since then I’ve tried to make myself speed up when a squirrel is in the roadway, but to no avail. It’s just driver instinct.

After my most recent squirrel sighting, I walked around the house to make sure there were no new tenants. I didn’t see any, but did see where my late husband, Bill, had patched over three wood siding holes to keep them out.

He’d covered those holes with tin printing plates used for The Hennessey Clipper when it was printed years ago at the El Reno Tribune.

It seems just like yesterday when we’d stayed up all night pasting up newspaper pages on grid sheets, then drove them to El Reno to be printed. That was when I started typing my Clipper stories on a manual typewriter in 1978, and we had “cold type” typesetting machines for straight-matter (stories and classified ads), and others for headlines, and ads.

Years later everyone in the office had a computer. We were able to not only write stories on them, but could use them to layout pages, then push a button to send them to our printer.

Although I’d never used hot type (Linotype) machines, my husband had as a teenager at The Clipper, then later at the OU Daily when he was in college. Bill had boasted he could set two galleys of straight matter type an hour back in those early days, then later in life enjoyed what he could find out on the internet.

He’d also prided himself for keeping those old metal printing plates, and his Yankee ingenuity, to use them to keep critters out of our home.