Atoning to the Chipmunk

Gentle Readers, I am all to aware that the atonement ought rightly to be laid at your feet.  I have been - let me be painfully honest here - lazy, slothful, and inattentive to my blogging duties.  I have salved the chirps of my conscience with the excuse, "But I need to rest really hard after all the horrendously overwhelming work of moving the contents of a five room apartment into an eleven room house, one room of which was a kitchen so filthy that the Leatherface family from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre would have collectively held its nose and stalked out, rather than cook anybody in it."

The truth is, I have been enthusiastically atoning to myself for all the many fancied wrongs and slights that leaving Manhattan has inflicted upon me, and that atonement has taken the form of a month in Paradise - Paradise, in this case, being a tiny Adirondack town about an hour and a half north of Albany.  We have been renting the same summer cottage here every year for decades, and it's all so bucolic that it makes my new home, which has deer, foxes, and flocks of wild turkeys trotting about in the backyard at all hours of the day and night, look like Times Square at rush hour.  While I've been AWOL, plenty has happened that I will talk about at greater length in other blogs, the chief event perhaps being the release of my friend John Wirenius's novel Phineas at Bay, which is now available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon.  As you may recall, I was the midwife cum domineditrix to Phineas, and I will have plenty to say about the delights of seeing this splendid book at last take physical shape - a sort of literary Pinocchio, joyously shouting, "Look, Father! I'm a real book at last!"

However, for today, let me just stick to the topic at hand - namely, atoning to the chipmunk.

One of the things that gives me infinite satisfaction about life in the Adirondack cottage is that I have a flower garden behind the house. (Incidentally, if any of you Gentle Readers can talk me through posting a few cell phone pictures here, then you, too, can have the pleasure of looking at my day lilies, New Guinea impatiens, lavender, and astilbes.)  Now, as every gardener knows, gardening consists of a certain number of surprises every year - "pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be," to quote dear Lady Bracknell, (or, as she is more fondly known to fans of Oscar Wilde, "Aunt Augusta.")  This year's pleasant surprises included the fact that, despite reports that the region endured three solid weeks of 20-degree-below-0 temperatures over the course of an exceptionally brutal winter, many of my perennials made it through, including the azaleas, those un-killable day lilies (they grow wild in the ditches here, and for some occult reason the deer don't eat them), the hostas (nibbled to nubs by the deer - that was one of the nasty surprises, but they are rebounding), the astilbes, and a lovely little heather patch that always gets me to murmuring about Heathcliff and Cathy under my breath, as I weed out the wild strawberry fronds that will try to strangle it.

Just before I left last year, I found myself with too much time on my hands, as well as a pair of garden loppers that called out to me that the devil finds work for idle hands, so let's get to it.  So, I went wild with the loppers and cleared out all the underbrush that had rendered the wooded glade beyond our yard completely impassable.  The grounds-keeping crew was not best pleased at being expected to cart away mountains of chopped-down scrub pine and maple saplings just when all the other Summer People had gone home and they thought they could relax and drink a beer.  However, we have great chiaroscuro light this year, and the lilies-of-the-valley have taken advantage of the newly-created space to hurry down the hill and stake their claim before the maples and the pines come back to shriek they were unfairly evicted and have been reinstated on an appeal.  That was another of the good surprises.  I've sown a wildflower seed shade mix from The Vermont Wildflower Farm in the shady area, and if those come up, it will be another nice surprise.

What I didn't reckon on was the disagreeable surprise that something other than lilies-of-the-valley might find the nice, clear, richly fertile ground that has been quietly slumbering under a thick layer of composting leaves for decades appealing, too.  Something with four feet, a stubby tail, and fur.  Something that likes to tunnel.

That's right, we've got moles.

Or maybe it's groundhogs.  Or then again, it could be chipmunks.  Whatever it is - and I've never caught it in the actual act of popping its begrimed little whiskery head out of the neatly-dug little hole that appears like magic under my suddenly-wilted annuals, whose roots have undergone an underground assault in the Tunnel Construction Project - it is pissing me off royally.  Not only that - it's been winning.  No matter how many times I go out and stomp down the tunnels, there they are again the next morning.

Now, in all fairness, the gopher, or mole, of chipmunk - the Offending Rodent, in short - is undoubtedly saying to itself, "Whatever this creature in the absurd outfit consisting of a long-sleeved man's Brooks Brothers shirt with frayed cuffs and ring around the collar, ancient dungarees filth-encrusted at the knees, leather-palmed gloves, battered old shoes that are too disreputable to be worn around town lest the charitably-inclined offer their wearer a quarter and a cup of coffee, and a perfectly ridiculous over-sized straw hat may be, it is pissing me off royally.  No matter how many times I laboriously construct my beautifully-engineered tunnels, the bitch comes out and, like some sort of sartorially-challenged Godzilla, stomps them back down."

Naturally, I have the advantage, in that I have bigger feet.  I also have the Internet, which the mole, chipmunk, or gopher does not. (I think.)  After the second or third appalled morning of tunnel-stomping, I got online and started researching how to persuade the little bugger that it had better go try exercising this Eminent Domain crap elsewhere.

Some of the online mole-haters got quite vituperative, and advocated wholesale slaughter, arguing that the critters deserved death and destruction for the havoc they wreak in carefully-tended gardens.  I feel their wrath. I feel their pain.  But a certain degree of fair play deters me. The critters were here first, after all.  Besides, I'm a vegetarian.  True - I'm a vegetarian who eats lobster - but there aren't any lobsters digging up my garden, or we'd be having an entirely different - and far more interesting - discussion.

What I finally did was ask my Husband the Chef to mix up a vile concoction of vegetable oil, Frank's Hot Sauce, and dishwashing liquid in a discarded water bottle.  I shook it up vigorously, and the resulting witch's broth looked just like a Creamsicle Smoothy, though it smelled far too nasty to be anything of the sort.  This elixir was then poured into the tunnels, which I had deliberately left un-stomped so I could ratchet up the warfare by rendering the tunnels unusable.

So far, no new tunnels have emerged.  My flowers and I are jumping for joy.

But I also have a weakness for chipmunks, mainly because they are so darned cute.  And since I had some leftover birdseed from last year, I decided to extend the olive branch.  Choosing a spot that was far enough away from the garden to prevent the chipmunk from claiming that I was sending Mixed Messages and inviting it to come gorge itself on the roots of my plants, I poured a pile of birdseed (grain, mixed with a generous proportion of sunflower seeds) on the ground in a spot I could see from my bedroom window and from the kitchen door, and waited.

It wasn't long till I glanced out to see an ecstatic chipmunk who seemed to be suffering from a dozen impacted wisdom teeth, so bulged-out were its cheek-pouches.  It clearly couldn't believe its luck, and kept looking around from time to time to see whether anybody else in the rodent family was coming to despoil it of this inexplicable bonanza.  It worked busily away for half an hour or so, hastening under the house to carry off the spoils to some little chipmunk-stash that will not, I hope, be raided by some larger animal. It was the happiest chipmunk I ever saw.  I hope the little guy understands that this was my way of saying, "I'm sorry I had to stomp your tunnel, and I would like to co-exist in peace."