I like being outside. The weather in my state usually facilitates this inclination on my part to an agreeable degree (pun intended). In the depths of summer, when the humidity can be cut with a knife and the bugs are out to play and temps don’t drop out of the seventies at night, I dream of the cold, clear nights when the frost sneaks out from between the trees and everything is chilled and beautiful amd silent. This past weekend, when the temps dropped into the teens and single digits and the nights were bone-achingly frigid, I dreamed of the pleasantly clement evenings when we sit on the screened-in porch and watch the sunset sky while fireflies squint and blink in the gloaming. After a scorching afternoon mowing the yard, I fantasize about Autumn days when my nose runs and my cheeks get rosy with the cold. After a frosty day raking up twigs, I think of the beauty of a warm night's stroll from downtown, the air filled with the aroma of jasmine and magnolia blossom. I’m pretty much never satisfied, but regardless of my mood, I still like to be outside in all kinds of weather. And I realize while I'm out there that I'm basically blundering through the nests and burrows and hives of creatures that call the outdoors their home.
I was taught at a young age to pay attention to this panoply of life and as much as I can, I try to honor its right to survive and be unbothered. Since I was little, the things going on in the outside world filled me with awe and respect. Nature in all her glory has something to show us in every season. The marvelous reality of nature's power and industry is all around us and it is worth paying attention to. We, too, are part of the web of nature and we ought to act accordingly, though we usually don’t.
As a homeowner, though, I have in some ways abandoned my childlike fascination because of an ongoing pitched battle between me and the many denizens of the realm outside my doors. It’s one thing to respect that life. It is another to let it in and have the run of the place. There’s nothing in the world more challenging than trying to maintain a healthy regard for this planet while also trying to keep those lifeforms from taking over our home and property. I try to maintain that balance, but it isn't easy.
Several years ago, during a coldsnap, I had a days-long battle with a tiny rodent that wanted to shack up in our pantry. I began noticing ‘signs’ of this invader and during my reconnaissance discovered that many of our winter stores had been chewed through and nibbled upon. I spent an entire weekend holed up in the pantry ferociously cleaning, sealing cracks, jamming holes with steel wool and putting things into less gnaw-able storage containers. We have two domestic felines, but they must have been on strike during this particular moment because they didn't lift a paw to help. As a result of their inaction, I felt a little less willing to be tolerant and forgiving to the invader and was not kind in my successful campaign to evict it.
As I wrote last year, we have also had bats come into the house. Bruce, the first visitor, was an accident and wanted out as much as we wanted him out. More recently, I had to duck and dive out of the way to avoid one of Bruce’s cousins who either flew into the house while the door was open or it got stuck down our chimney and was dislodged when I fired up our gas logs.
Around this time of year, too, we get an influx of ladybug beetles. I’ve tried and tried to find out where they come in. I’m not sure if there is a small section of flashing that has been pulled away by the weather or inquisitive squirrels, but every time I go into our upstairs bedrooms, I’m swooped on by a squadron of tiny fellows in red with black polka dots. My step grandmother used to have this problem, but she would leave tiny thimbles full of sugar water for them. I’m not so inclined. I have no real issue with ladybugs, except I wish they’d find somewhere else to huddle during the winter months.
Such is life in the South. Fruit flies in the Spring and Fall, regular flies swooping in when we let the dogs out during the summer; bees, water beetles, palmetto bugs, ants, spiders, those horrible jumping crickets that are part ninja, part nightmare fuel that gather in our basement; all are unwelcome but show up anyway. I spray the inside and outside perimeters and set up traps in the summer, kill countless crawlies all summer and fall. It doesn't seem to help. Their siege has an unlimited resource of living things to call upon and they are undaunted by their losses.
Outside, I battle the other kingdoms. Green and growing things are as pesty and persistent as the critters (if not more so). Stone walkways have to be continuously weeded. Grass grows faster the hotter and rainier it is. I’m at war with several species of ‘junk’ trees that just pop up wherever. Virginia creeper and English ivy keep me busy enough to retire and just fill my days with yanking down tendrils that have grown up the side of my house seemingly overnight. Fast-growing shoots of other varieties climb my trees, swell into my gardens and flowerbeds. I’ve repeatedly pulled up and yanked out every kind of privet imaginable; I’ve sprayed brush killer on poison ivy, cut back the weird thorny things that grow uninvited under our deck. This year, again, I'll have to pay the pressure washer guy to come out and kill the moss and algae that grows on the north-facing surfaces of our house. Mildew, fungi and other organisms that love the dark are yet another perpetual enemy I have to face down.
Outside bugs keep me fighting in whole other campaigns. I’ve dealt with white-faced hornets in our magnolia trees: a particularly grouchy and painful armored warrior wasp species. Two years ago we had yellowjackets in the yard and in the creases of our house and in the railroad ties around some natural border by an old slate patio. Mosquitoes, biting flies, fleas, ticks, carpenter ants, snakes and you name it, I’ve had to deal with it. And we live in the suburbs. Our middle son and his wife live in the mountainous western part of the state and they have all these issues but at an arrestingly higher rate. During a recent visit at the holidays, the number of ladybugs glommed onto the inside of his garage door made the ladybugs at our house look like a leisurely day party by comparison. It's like this with everything else, too.
All of this is to be expected. No one who owns a home anywhere in the lower fifty will find any of this unusual. The bugs and critters and plant life may be different, but the conflict is the same. Desert dwellers have to worry about sidewinders and scorpions and cacti. People in the pacific northwest states like Montana, have to worry about grizzlies and moose and rutting elk. Growing up in Pennsylvania, we had extremely intemperate timber rattlers, forests of poison oak and cadres of unstable hillbillies living in tar-paper shacks devouring people's cats and dogs and possibly worse. Residents of Florida and Louisiana probably have to think about gators and other swamp-dwelling nightmares (not to mention psychotic, power-hungry right-wing governors). The planet is filled to brimming with every kind of “creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” and winter time is the only time we get even a slight break from all of the growing and fruitfully multiplying beasts and plants just outside our doors.
While I’d love it if the temps stayed a little more to this side of the single digits, I know that within the next few months, about the time that we turn the clocks back, green things will grow again and tiny chthonian creatures will worm up out of the mud and wreak havoc on my peace of mind. Until we move somewhere there is permanent winter all year, that’s a problem we’re going to have. Even in those cold places, aspects of the outdoors will be too difficult to endure for comfort. A month solid of night time would be murder to our moods. No night during the summer would be enough to make me drop into tenebrous madness, seeking any darkness available to me. Therefore, we set ourselves up a kind of mental barrier in which we understand that, despite my best intentions and my hardest work to keep the life outside of our house (except the accepted ones—our dogs and cats and our family) some things are going to get in and the grass will always need to be mowed, so I'll be fighting on at least two fronts until we are moved fussing and swearing into assisted living and it becomes someone else’s problem.
Right now, we are dealing with the effects of a brutally cold arctic funnel or whatever, but at least there are no bugs. Later, when we are dealing with the bugs, we’ll look back with nostalgia to when it was too cold for all that creepeth upon the ground to survive, even though the pipes bursteth under the street.
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