I originally posted on 8/4/26 and got a reply but can't seem to respond
to that so I'm posting again.  Even when I posted I seemed to remember
that directory links were different but couldn't locate why, today I
found it and am posting for everyone's potential future use.

The number of links shown for a directory in Linux is 2 (the named
directory inself  as well as the '.' entry in it) plus the number of
direct subdirectories (in essence the '..' entry in each direct
subdirectory) in it.  To see a listing of the “direct subdirectories”
use tree -d -L 1 <directory>.

inode programs such as find do not report any of the '.' or '..' entries..