During my formative years, my exposure to "nature" consisted of 500 square feet of grass and a handful of marigolds. Past my swings there was a field of wavy hay, an occasional ditch, and camouflage-perfect low bushes—just great for hiding when my mother would call that it was bath time. (Back then, you didn't get to shower until you were 14—don't ask me why, it was just the way things were.)
My ignorance of Mother Nature was compounded when I moved to the asphalt jungle of New York City. To me, "animals" meant the construction workers catcalling females walking by.
Twenty years later I moved to the country, and from my office window I watched my neighbor's golden retriever happily chasing a stick around their yard. How charming, I thought, living next to the Waltons with a nice family dog.
One afternoon I arrived home, and balancing three heavy grocery bags, I made it down my long walk. Suddenly I heard a low, ominous growl. I stood absolutely still; the hair on my legs snapped to attention. I didn't breathe.
Then I saw that golden retriever—he looked gigantic up close; he had a stick in his mouth and he was growling and showing his teeth. His eyes narrowed as he dropped the stick, never taking his beady eyes off mine. He didn't blink—neither did I. We stood there, him growling and me slowly wetting my pants.
He moved closer. I could hear the little boy next door calling for the dog. He started to bark really loud (the dog), and then I dropped the bags and ran to the car, the dog chasing me. I locked myself in and screamed, "Go away, you don't live here!" Suddenly, the dog was gone.
I sat in the car for two hours until hubby came home. He calmly said, "The dog was just afraid you'd take his stick. He was protecting it, that's all."
Then I discovered that our historical little cottage (that's spin for ramshackle, too-small house) had, ah, well, a mouse problem. I woke up one morning to find a tiny mouse nonchalantly nibbling leftover popcorn in a huge glass bowl on the counter. My husband quickly turned the bowl over, with the mouse still in it. The mouse was now in a glass biosphere. We stood there debating our next move while the mouse began to pace.
"He's suffocating in there!" I yelled.
"Well, don't you want him to die?"
"Yes, but not like that."
"Like how, then?" he asked, getting impatient.
"Fast... and painlessly."
"Should I flush him?"
"No! I'll never be able to sit on the can again!"
"Okay then, how?"
"I gotta go," I said. "You figure it out."
Six hours later, I got home and found the big glass bowl sitting on the front lawn, tightly wrapped in a plastic bag.
Hubby: "I couldn't get him out of the bowl so I wrapped it in plastic so he'd suffocate. We both went outside to see the suffocated mouse.
No mouse, just a little hole at the bottom of the bag. We looked at each other, a lot wiser about mice. "Oh well," my husband said, "At least he's gone now, he won't come back, and he'll be scared."
We just had a birthday cake for the mouse, which just turned 3—it's like a pet.
Humorist and freelance scribe Joyce Faiola is a consultant for the hospitality industry and lives in Connecticut. Her e-mail is JLFaiola@Juno.com
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