Absolutely No Privacy

Absolutely No Privacy

by | May 13, 2010 | Daily Life

The temperatures turned chilly last weekend. Frost coated the grass Sunday morning, but the cold weather didn’t slow down the critters in our yard. Instead, the bracing air seemed to whip them into a frenzy, and our normally quiet yard was as busy as the pub district on a Friday night.

First, an insecure male cardinal discovered his reflection in the glass of a garage window. For hours, he clucked menacingly at his presumed rival. When he wasn’t doing that, he flew a regular circuit from the ledge to the garage roof, to the chimney top of the barbecue pit to the picnic table to the hedge to the nearest tall tree. He fluffed his feathers and chirped away, trying to claim his territory but every time he flew back to the window ledge, his pesky rival was still staring at him in the glass.

That neck of the woods was the weekend hot spot for other critters, as I discovered when rounding the corner of the garage during my morning walk the same day. A squirrel crouched in a corner created by the hose caddy and garage wall. The next time I passed by, he had one paw on the lowest slat of siding, and his head crammed below it. When he heard me pass by, he hid beneath the hose caddy, but didn’t run away. I moved beyond his line of vision and turned around. His head was under the siding again, and when it finally popped out, he was chewing vigorously on who knows what.

The next morning, when I opened the kitchen door, a movement under one of our spruce trees caught my attention. A woodchuck, low to the ground and trying to look invisible, scurried from the base of one tree to another. Then he aimed for the shed, and with one frantic burst of speed, disappeared behind it. Feeling a bit like the White Witch of Narnia  as she scared away the woodland creatures loyal to Aslan, I got in the car and drove to church.

After church, while I put lunch on the table, the no tailed cat strolled past the kitchen window, blinked at me and meowed. “Our yard is crawling with critters,” I told Hiram and proceeded to give him the weekend wildlife rundown. I thought we moved to here to get away from it all. But this weekend, we’ve had absolutely no privacy.”

Hiram looked at me and smiled. “It’s a great place to live, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Yes, it is.”

War Is Hell

War Is Hell

by | Sep 11, 2009 | Walking Down the Gravel Road

Man, life is dangerous along our little gravel road these days. Every morning, the squirrels are terrorizing the neighborhood with their nutty shenanigans. They crouch on tree limbs, ammunition in hand, waiting for unsuspecting dufasses, namely me, to walk by. The minute I do, they fire with both barrels, dropping black walnuts and acorns with way too much glee.

If you still don’t believe beautiful September is dangerous around here, just ask our neighbors, the kamikaze toads and frogs. Of course the ones who dash from one side of the road to the other, and end their lives wearing tire tracks and doing a fair imitation of Flat Stanley, can no longer tell you how dangerous it is in these parts. But a stroll down the lane, which ends up being more of a pick-your-way-past-the-corpses and duck-before-the-squirrels-nab-you, provides gruesome proof if you need it.

As for me, I’m donning combat gear until the critters hibernate. Between my broken umbrella that protects me from rodent terrorists and Hiram’s old galoshes that keep froggy Flat Stanleys from slipping into my shoes, I pretty much scare off the wildlife on my daily walks.

Tell you what, the guy who said war is hell knew what he was talking about. But then again, walking four miles in Hiram’s galoshes is no picnic.

How long until October and the first frost?