Living with Nature

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.
-- Albert Einstein

This morning, I came down to the kitchen to be greeted with the sight of a brand new bag of cat food, chewed open; a brand new bunch of organic bananas, dragged into a corner and chewed and shredded and demolished; a tray of croissants, opened and chewed; and papers from my kitchen island strewn across the room. And a cat inside who hadn’t been in when I went to bed last night.

It was a little freaky, to say the least.

I finally found a kitchen window with part of the screen ripped off. I think that was the access point. We have raccoons that visit, and steal our cat food from the porch. We feed the cats outside, to minimize the possibility of mice, since we live in a big crooked old farmhouse. And this spring, a momma raccoon and her six babies found our supply of cat food and are now regular visitors, even though we bring the cat food in every afternoon, in a vain attempt to discourage them from visiting every night.

The babies are grown now, so we have seven very large and plump raccoons that stop by on a regular basis. They don’t worry about timing too much, and visit late in the morning, and late in the afternoon, not just at night, so our window for feeding the cats grows smaller and smaller. And they startle my daughters all the time; the girls are now afraid to run out to the car once it’s twilight, even though the car’s only 10 feet from the side door.

We’ve taken to making a great racket with pots and lids, clanging like crazy in another vain attempt to scare them off. It works for bears … why not for raccoons. They ran away the first time. The second time they scurried a bit slower. The third and fourth time, only about half ran away; the other half only went a few feet and squatted to watch and see what we’d do next. Only when I ran out in bare feet and my nightie, still clanging pot and lid, chasing them back down the hill into the woods, did they finally run.

Now they just go under the car and laugh at me, running around like a crazy woman in my nightie and bare feet, making noise and shrieking like a banshee, in case that helps. My eleven-year-old is brave enough to run out with me, and has a much better shrill banshee scream, and the other two shriek from the kitchen door. The raccoons still laugh at us. And now, evidently, they feel they can visit our kitchen and eat our food with impunity.

We’re learning to live with bats in the attic, house flies that won’t quit and laugh at the fly paper hanging all over the house, spiders galore, and a major infestation of sugar ants who laugh at the ant traps I put out. I’m headed to the store to buy borax today, to make some better homemade time-tested ant traps. The bats do keep away the mosquitoes, though, and look beautiful flying around outside in the evening. And so far, none have found their way downstairs into the house, so I don’t mind the bats.

So our challenge this summer has been to live with a new face of nature that we didn’t need to endure in our last house, which was newer, more air tight, less crooked, and crevice- and crack-free. It’s been a challenge, especially waking up to a raccoon mess in my kitchen this morning. That window is now permanently shut, and I’m thinking maybe a dog wouldn’t be a bad idea after all…

Albert Einstein probably didn’t have to live with pests.


Here's a link for good homemade ant traps:
http://www.grinningplanet.com/2004/04-27/ant-control-ant-killer-article.htm