Published: October 30, 2009 09:00 am      

At war with Mother Nature

I love fall, having always declared it to be my favorite season. I gush in glowing descriptions of gilt and scarlet and copper leaves and crimson vines winding up gray tree trunks. I rave about jewel-toned chrysanthemums and glowing jack-o-lanterns and cute little kids in costumes and the anticipation of Thanksgiving and Christmas. I get off on breathing cool, crisp, champagne-clear autumn air.

But I despise two things about this season. The first is mice and the second is Asian beetles. Right at the moment, I’m experiencing infestations of both. The mice have taken over the downstairs and the Asian beetles hold sway in the upstairs.

The mice are sly and secretive. We usually aren’t aware of their invasion until we notice the nibbled ends of cereal boxes and cookies with missing corners, as well as the other little gifts they leave behind. Mom promptly goes into hysterics and instantly begins taking everything out of cupboards and drawers, tossing away food, scrubbing silverware.

The most puzzling thing the mice always do is eat the plastic off the mixer cord. They may ignore the dogfood and the oatmeal but evidently, a mixer cord is to mice as candy is to children. This is the third mixer I’ve thrown away because of a cord stripped down to bare wire by gnawing mice. They don’t bother the cords of toasters, blenders or can openers. If I could speak mouse language, the one question I would ask is — “what the heck is it with you guys and mixer cords?’

Mom will not allow a mousetrap in the house. She says she’d stress out anticipating the snap that indicated a caught mouse. A dead one would be bad enough but a wounded, flopping one would be even worse. If it happened when I wasn’t home, she’d have a nervous breakdown.

So, we put out d-Con. Every night she puts it in a drawer and every night, it has been eaten, presumably resulting in dead mice. But if this is so, then new mice take their place like clockwork. She’s been using d-Con for two weeks and for two weeks, the mice have been scarfing it up. Maybe the mice have mutated genetically over the years so that they now thrive on what used to poison them.

While Mom has been fighting the battle of the mice, I’ve been dealing with lady bugs. I don’t really mean lady bugs, of course, not the cute little red and black ones that we used to call lady bugs. What we have now are larger, meaner, orange Asian beetles.

I could hate them just for that but even more, I loathe them for the method of shock and awe they use when they attack.

One night, there are no beetles, then the next evening I go up to my room to be confronted with clumps of them in the window, hordes of them crawling on the ceiling, balls of them curled in the ashtray, lines of them walking on the lamp shade casting monstrously magnified bug shadows on the wall.

The first night, I was ready for bed. I didn’t want to go to sleep breathing toxic clouds of Raid, so I hair sprayed them to death. I figured I’d been subjecting my lungs to hair spray for 40 years and if it was going to asphyxiate me, it would have done it by now. And, let me tell you, Rave Mega Hold does a number on them. Before it was over, thousands of orange corpses littered my room.

The only problem is, you have to spray them directly to kill them so the next night, the second wave had moved in and we started over. I’m sure the expression on my face resembled Dirty Harry’s when he told the bad guy to “make my day.” Only I was aiming a can of bug spray rather than a .44 magnum.

I actually feel sort of guilty because I profess to be something of an environmentalist with compassion for the other creatures with whom I share the earth. And that’s more or less true when I’m facing one thing — one little mouse, one spider, one Asian beetle. When they send whole armies after me though, I quickly turn into a vicious, death-dealing hypocrite. Hey, I’m in kill or be killed mode here.

Meanwhile, a friend told me that if I make a line of moth balls all around the foundation of my house, they will ward off both mammals and insect intruders. Mom went forth to purchase this new weapon (or, old weapon, really, I guess) in the on-going stand-off between humankind and nature.

When she returned, I very carefully made a row of white balls all around the house. So, now we wait to see if it works. Stand-by for updates.

• Vicki Williams is a columnist for the Pharos-Tribune. She can be reached through the newspaper at ptnews@pharostribune.com