Critters.

This morning I go down to the beach in front of the family cottage on Lake Michigan.  A lone Blue Heron stands way out there on an invisible rock, just below the surface.  Dozens of geese sit quietly in the water, resting up for their flight south.
 

I like critters.  In their place.
 

I spend the next two hours crawling on my hands and knees around the foundation of the cottage with a hammer, a tin-snips, a box of big galvanized fencing staples and an unwieldy roll of what some fool laughingly named “hardware cloth.”
 

Hardware cloth is no more cloth-like than the grill of a 1957 DeSoto.  If you don’t know what hardware cloth is, I can describe it to you and you’ll recognize it. It is fencing, made of very stiff galvanized wire, woven in tiny squares.  People use it to make cages. The stuff I am using this morning is ¼ inch hardware cloth, which means that the openings in the squares are ¼’ across.
 

My task this morning is to cut the miserable stuff in long strips and to nail it to the bottom edge of the cottage so that it sticks down into the sand.  It will, hopefully, keep the skunks, squirrels, woodchucks and raccoons from going under the cottage to live.  The plumber who went under the cottage to open things up for us this spring told me I needed to do this.  He mentioned particularly the skunks.
 

It is an awful job, and my hands are soon bleeding from the sharp wires and I am filthy from the sand and cobwebs.  I have leaves and pine needles in my hair and I am sweating profusely, which only makes the grit stick to me more.
 

When I finish this task and try to go inside to wash up, Marsha suggests that I can only come in for a Final Rinse after I use the hose on myself.  And then she tells me that I need to do something about the mice.
 

“What mice?”  I say.
 

“The mice that left their droppings in that cupboard over there.  And that one over there, and the other one over there.”
 

So, it is off to the store to buy something with which to make the last days of the mice living in our cottage a less than pleasant ending.
 

When I return, I discover one of the screens on one of the upstairs French doors is damaged slightly.  Slightly?  Did I say slightly? 
 

It is quite evident that either a small child or a large dog has gone through the doorway onto the balcony by walking through the screen. 

This is not a functioning door and the screen is fixed in place. Big dog, small child-- either way, since it walked through my screen, breaking the wooden frame and ripping out the screening, it is a critter.
 

We’re still faced with the long drive home with guess who? in the back seat?  Wrigley W. Whitehouse, the wonder dog.  A critter.  He’ll sleep most of the way, but when he isn’t sleeping, he’ll be trying as hard as he can to insert himself into the front seat. And breathing into my nose.

Woe is me.
 

So, who should I root for?  The coyote or the roadrunner?  I don’t care.  They’re both critters. 

                               by Jim Whitehouse

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