The Long Way Home 10.4.24

Six years ago, I went under the knife at Mayo’s Saint Mary’s Hospital in Rochester. Since the prognosis for my survival wasn’t clear, I stopped at the Colvill firehall that Sunday to spend time with friends and neighbors and say goodbye. The fall weather was fine. The leaves were past peak but still enough to gaze at them in awe, unsure if I’d ever see them again as I drove the County Road 14 loop.

The fine surgeons and other specialists at Mayo worked some magic. I survived. Thankfully, our son, Fernie Junior, had moved in to help with the chores of managing a house in the woods, and I could focus on healing, pacing the front porch multiple times each day to build some stamina.

Since those days, I’ve been able to function pretty well in the fall. Cutting, splitting, and stacking a half-dozen cords of firewood, usually finishing just before the first snow. Procrastination could be my middle name. 

Knowing that I would be employed to the end of September by the local soil and water district, inspecting boats and telling boaters about invasive species, the Bohunk and I decided it would be less stressful to buy firewood already cut and split, which we did in the spring. I stacked it for drying before I swatted my first skeeter and could deliver my first lecture to a boater about Spiny the Waterflea. 

Fall felt different this year. It's much warmer than usual. There was only one morning in September when we thought about, but didn’t start, a fire in the wood stove. And we haven’t had a bear in the apple trees. 

But some parts of this fall are typical. The amount of daylight shrinks rapidly, and soon, we’ll go to bed and get up while it’s still dark—the exact opposite of mid-summer. The darkness tests the bindings of my sanity.

Like every fall, we are dealing with annoying intruders. Until a couple of years ago, red squirrels entered our crawl space. They never invaded our living area but made enough racket to drive the dogs crazy. 

We identified the entry point old red was using when we replaced the porch on the north side of the house a couple of summers ago. The kitchen wing of the house rests on piers with plywood skirting. The opening that allowed the water line through the plywood was about four sizes too big. Our contractor, John Skadberg, commented that the hole was big enough for the squirrel to enter “standing up.”  We patched that up, and no more squirrels disrupting us.

Our old house, drafty and inefficient, has seen rascally mice invade yearly. We’ve patched every conceivable entry spot, but the little rodents somehow manage to get in as fall sets in.

Last week, as I always do, I got up long before sunrise. After dressing, I went to the kitchen to start coffee. Alert, patient, and sitting next to the stove was Winthrop, the cat that adopted us, the anti-cat people we were when we lived in Illinois. Until recent years, he hasn’t shown himself to be much of a mouser. 

I checked the JAWZ traps under the kitchen sink and found my first dead rodent. I cleared the trap and retired to the loveseat just off the kitchen with my coffee. Not long into my newsfeed, Feedly if you're curious, I saw Winthrop stroll out of the kitchen with a self-satisfied look on his face and a mouse firmly in his mouth. 

I thought the mouse was dead, so I told Winthrop to drop it. Cats don’t do what they’re told. Fiona, the true Alpha Bitch in the house, came out from the bedroom then to say her piece. Winthrop listens to Fiona. He dropped the mouse, which wasn’t dead but terrorized. I grabbed the little beast, slippery with cat saliva, and it immediately got away. But not from Fiona. She picked it up and ran into the living room with me on her heels. I’d hoped Fiona had dispatched the damn thing, but no. I told her to drop it, which she did, and I tried to grab it again, but it had enough energy to escape into the bedroom.

When I worked as “The Hoot” at the Cook County Home Center, I could tell every fall that almost everyone in our corner of paradise had mice trouble. Some years worse than others, perhaps. But every fall, the d-Con mouse poison, the Victor old-style traps, and the very efficient JAWZ seemed to fly off the shelf, along with the Grandpa Gus mouse repellant. 

Now, if I can get Winthrop, our mouser, to become a mouse executioner, I’ll feel much better.