Mats Janzon was out walking near his home in Sweden when he heard a soft peeping sound in the grass. It was a baby otter, alone, and when no mother came after several hours of waiting, he went looking and found she’d been killed on a nearby road. The pup was starving and barely breathing. He had never raised an otter in his life. He took her home anyway.
The otter who keeps coming back
Janzon had left a career as a pilot to spend more time in nature, and animals, he says, kept finding him — birds mostly, including a crow named Huginn who lived with him for three years before rejoining the wild. An otter was new territory. He was scared. She needed round-the-clock care, and he had no guide for what he was doing.
He named her Leya, and she thrived. She cried when he left the room and curled into his lap to feel safe. He started her swimming lessons in a plastic kiddie pool in the backyard, awkward paddling that slowly, over weeks, turned into real swimming. She became part of a small household menagerie — the crow, a cat, an otter — that played hide and seek around the bushes.
When she was ready, he took her to the lake. She looked up at him as if asking what came next. He nodded, and she jumped in.
Letting her go, as she grew and began wandering farther and staying out longer, was, in Janzon’s words, “part pride, part heartbreak.” But she started living the life an otter is supposed to live. And she never fully left. Even now, when he’s out on a morning kayak ride, her nose will break the surface of the water nearby, and she’ll swim over for a visit before disappearing again into the lake that is, these days, as much her home as his.
Read the full story at Upworthy.
Smyrna’s Christmas parade turns 51
Mark the calendar: the 51st Smyrna Christmas Parade steps off at 2 p.m. on Sunday, December 6, down Lowry Street in downtown Smyrna. This year’s theme, “A Star-Spangled Christmas: Celebrating America’s 250th,” ties the town’s long-running holiday tradition to next year’s national milestone.
Fifty-one years is a long time for any town to keep showing up for itself every December. It means grandparents who watched the parade as kids are now bringing grandkids to the same curb on Lowry Street.
Read the full story at WGNS Radio.
An otter who won’t quite let go of the man who raised her, and a parade that’s rolled down the same street for half a century — both are, in their own way, about things that are built to last longer than they had to. If something is going right in your corner of the Boro, we’d like to hear about it.