At lunch today, I took another walk along my usual route- half a mile out and half a mile back to the east on the arroyo trail.

Today, it felt nothing like winter, though- the sky, criss-crossed by vapor trails, was a deep blue, and the sun was warm.

As I approached the park near at the far end of my stroll, I was surprised to look up into a not-so-tall bare tree off of the pathway and see, doing its best to avoid my gaze, a squirrel frozen in a few thin upright branches. I paused and snapped a few pics of it, and it remained where it was, a stiff amenable subject, and then I walked on and did several short loops by the park before rejoining the path on my homebound leg, and as I approached the little tree again, I look up to see the squirrel still doing whatever it was doing among the branches, and then as I neared it, it scurried down the trunk and into the shallow knolls of the field nearby.