Terminal

On Saturday my wife was working in our garden and alerted me to the fact that there appeared to be a swarm of puny locusts emerging en masse from a couple of 4x4s along our fence. This led me to a Google image search which led to exploring how to identify termites which led to some considerable denial which led to researching the severity of termite infestations and how worrisome this should be which led to what I hope was a tragic holocaust amongst the insect kingdom when I sprayed the entire area thoroughly down with bug poison. I doused the lawn too for good measure and this morning noticed a robin out there who seemed lost without any little creatures to feast on. Tough nails, pal. We're in a war.

Every place my girl and I have lived together has had an infestation that is a revelation to us. Our Manhattan apartment of course had roaches, but then it turned out they could fly and dive bomb our faces, which was certainly a new one. From there we graduated to millipedes and gnats and spider mites in Brooklyn, and snails too once we had some space outdoors. When we moved upstate and to a place against a forest, wasps appeared for the first time. Oh, and the ant parade! This was the birth of my poison days, when I graduated from being that child who insisted on putting any little buddy found in the kitchen back outside to decreeing that every last member of that drone bastard's colony was going straight to hell. Predictably it all backfired when wifey and I both got tick bites and acquired Lyme disease before we had even unpacked. This sort of reinforced the whole concept behind the poison thing.

Varmints are a different tale. We've entertained deer and birds in the garden, snakes and toads in the lawn and turkeys in the driveway who I had to shoo away once to be sure I didn't miss my train. There have been raccoons and groundhogs and of course the damn squirrels. God, the squirrels. I drilled a few over the years with snowballs but they never could take a hint. Yet our most reliable unwanted companions – no matter where we've lived – have been mice, who frankly have been the most difficult to hate as well. They're just furrier and more cuddly than an opossum or aphid could ever be, even when they're tearing through my bags of rice in the pantry. 

There was the little dude I encountered the same day we returned from our honeymoon, who got cornered on the kitchen counter and then tried to hide behind an empty vase, which only magnified his tiny face and created one of the cutest goddamn images I've ever seen. He was eventually caught in a humane trap and released into the nearest park to our apartment, where I realized I had sent him to his doom as soon as he scampered away from me. I've honestly never completely forgiven myself for that. There was also the guy I nabbed in a totally different kitchen years later, who I mistakenly made eye contact with and subsequently felt an obligation toward. He was banished to the shed but accommodated with an elaborate two-story cardboard house full of old towels for warmth, where it appeared he thrived with what I hope was a happy family, though there was no trace of him when we moved out a few months later. I feared the worst for him as well.

These days I'm burdened with four feral cats on and about my lawn and the mice stories have inevitably dried up for the time being. The felines are awful in their own way, though it's these new visitors that concern me most. Just too much uncertainty. They're building a termite Tenochtitlan under my lawn for all I know. So it's difficult to see how I'll ever enjoy telling the rest of this saga, but it's a safe bet that it will end up involving more poison. War is hell, what can I say?