Houseguests

Photo courtesy of Spencer Greet

One of the interesting things about living in a semi-rural setting is that the fauna (not to mention flora) in the area never let you forget that you are an interloper.

Here they were, these birds or these ants or these bees, minding their own business and going about their buzzing, flying, crawling lives, and one day some human shows up, cuts the trees down, digs a big hole in the ground, and builds a house, without so much as a by-your-leave.

What about us, the woodland creatures and insects say in an aggrieved tone, which in reality probably sounds like a lot of squeaks and whistles and chirpy noises. You think that you can just come in here and displace us, and we'll just go meekly away and find another tree to live in?

Well, you've got another think coming.

So, here you are, Homeowning Interloper, in this house, and there is the patter of tiny feet all around you. These would not be the feet of any of the house's official occupants, all of whom have fairly large feet.

No, these would be the feet of mice.

How on earth did the mice get in here, you ask. Oh, that's right, the basement door was wide open for pretty much all of January, because the lock was broken and you live on a hill and gale-force winds blew up the hill from the north and slammed into the basement door.

Meanwhile, there are mice out there, thinking to themselves, hmm, it's pretty cold out here. And that house over there has a very inviting-looking open doorway. I guess that means we get to live inside, instead of out in this frozen field. And so, the mouse family moves in, and the next thing you know, they are raiding the refrigerator and losing the remote in the sofa cushions.

Then, springtime comes. And you, Homeowning Interloper, hear strange noises. They are not quite inside the house, but they are not quite outside either. The noises sound like banging or flapping inside of a metal pipe.

That's because birds are building nests inside of your gutters. Yes, your home has become an avian condo. The feathered fiends are filling your gutters with their bird paraphenalia. They seem to work at very odd hours, and wake you with their excruciatingly early-morning activities. By the way, don't expect the gutters to fulfill their intended purpose any longer; they will become miniature Niagaras, loosing a curtain of water right in front of your door whenever it rains.

Speaking of condos, look outside and you will see holes around the size of a nickel punctuating the cedar siding. Those would be the apartment complexes of the carpenter bees, tunneling into the house like so many little Charles Bronsons in The Great Escape. They are escaping the outdoors, I guess.

Then you go down to the finished part of the basement; finished, I say, with drywall and Pergo floors and recessed lighting and everything, and what do you see? What could it be? Why, it is a spider the size of a camel, big enough to hold a saddle and take you across the Sahara. And even though you tell yourself that you have gotten over your fear of spiders, that you are a mature adult now, you back out of the room very slowly and go looking for someone else to deal with this menace.

You notice that the frame on one of the approximately 586 exterior doors to your house is rotted at the bottom, and your friend who is a handyman comes and rips it out and discovers an entire colony of ants apparently reinacting War and Peace in your doorjamb. He proceeds to annihilate the tiny buggers, but you know they will be back, with a vengeance.

Chipmunks, those Disneyesque rodents, run in and out of your stone retaining walls, every now and then stopping to stare at you impudently.

The brick patio, which you neglected to spray with pre-emergent stuff when you should have, now looks like a verdant meadow.

And so it goes. And you realize that in a battle of wits with Mother Nature, you are only half-armed.