We live in a subdivision just behind a busy thoroughfare that becomes highway just past the turn into our neighborhood. Behind us is a bit of wilderness that buffers us from the highway. We aren’t in the country and we aren’t officially in town, and this is the Ozarks, so a little touch of nature is never all that surprising. I have been stopped by deer while out running (both deer and me, I suppose) within a few miles of our house, and turkeys sometimes trot around behind us.
We also happen to be the favorite outpost for a colony of spirited squirrels who crawl up and down our stucco exterior with glee. It is nothing to be sitting near a window and almost get a high-five or a kiss blown from a passing rodent. The real high point, though, was this past winter when said colony found an opening beneath our roof and just over the master bedroom and bath. Be it midnight, just before dawn, or at sundown, the sound of amorous squirrels giving it one to another with abandon floated through the air.
My husband was raised by a pseudo-mountain-man from Arkansas. While Darin hasn’t had to skin and fry up a squirrel for dinner as was the custom for his impoverished father growing up with banjos playing in the distance, he has learned the ways of survival in midwest suburbia. Hey, during our courtship we went target shooting down at Bull Creek (and I outshot him, by the way). I also helped put up barbed wire fence and helped herd cows and/or listen to them get castrated out on his parents’ farm, but these are tales for another day. Anyhoo, suffice it to say that an army of nasty overfed squirrels in our attic was grounds for war.
My favorite moments were when he would go to the attic and pound on its floor/our ceiling while I attempted to track his movements in the civilized part of the house. We could hear the little bastards, you see, but we couldn’t find them. Eliminating the contaminants of our domestic tranquility kept poor Darin awake at night. Bleary eyed, he would gaze at the ceiling each morning after listening to squirrel Olympics with defeat and resolve, all-at-once.
They would die or be excommunicated. I wasn’t sure when or how, but it would happen. Eventually, with the help of some half-assed (see previous post about such work ethic) roofers, the entryway into the squirrels’ porno paradise was sealed. Quiet returned.
Things warmed up, though, and Grace reported multiple sightings of a large rodent she couldn’t identify just outside our basement. Eventually she was able to capture this guy (we named him Reggie for reasons that escape me) on film. Reggie had made a nice home for himself under our porch and some meals out of my flowers. We came home Saturday afternoon to a live viewing of Reggie. Darin, like a vigilante atop a watch tower, created a post for himself out of our bedroom window, sans screen. He waited. We watched.
In the meantime, I sighted a dead opossum which I was nominated to get rid of. With gloves I fearfully got the disgusting creature into a watering can, sprinted screaming toward the wilderness behind us and tossed it. This isn’t really my scene. Grace received a text a few moments later from a friend down the street asking if her mother had just been screaming and running behind the house. Yes, that was my mother, Grace replied.
But the groundhog remained elusive and I became afraid to walk out back. I didn’t want to be mistaken for the groundhog by Darin’s 22.
Safely inside, within a half hour of the possum’s funeral, I heard three shots. I glanced out to see that Reggie had met his end. I glanced in to Darin at his post to see a hunter’s pride. I gave him props for his sharpshooting and I also gave him the dreaded task of depositing Reggie out with the possum. Grace had left for a party, so I had to deliver the news via phone: “Reggie’s dead.”
Today I came home to find a little fox in our backyard. He was scratching and trolling about slowly. Very cute. I named him Ginge. Via text, Darin asked why I thought the fox was male. “I just assumed,” I wrote. “Males seem to enjoy scratching themselves A LOT more than females.” Who knows. Maybe he/she will return soon and we will become friends. Maybe the 22 will get another big moment from on high. Maybe the fox is out amongst the trees telling his buddies there is utter carnage over at the Wedgeworths'.
They have been warned ;).
No comments:
Post a Comment