Just a character sketch. Really.

A woman’s only son heads off to college. An empty nester, she moves to a house on Cape Cod, and hasn’t been there a year when she is visited upon by a female raccoon who has decided to make a nest for her brood in the woman’s bedroom walls. Does the animal somehow sense that the once full-time mother misses her child, and is now feeling less of a parent, obsolete in some way? Can she know that this woman (surely more than one who is busily engaged in the business of raising her children) longs for some attachment to the universality of motherhood? Through luck or intuition, the raccoon mother has chosen a safe haven for her family. The woman can hope that one day there will be grandchildren, but for now this is her only tie to her lost calling. This timely miracle in her walls, a gift.