The Pest in the Garden

The other day when I was doing my treadmill outside on my patio, in my beautiful garden, looking at the hummingbirds and roses, feeling in a zen like state, a scampering thing caught my eye. There I spied scurrying across the garden toward the bird feeder was a grey mouse. Yikes! I quickly called to my daughter to come out and see it. She's like what? I said a mouse! She came out excitedly, gee I've never seen a mouse. I said yes you have. She says no. What about Tom and Jerry? Yeah but that's animated. What about Stuart Little or the mice of Mousehunt with Nathan Lane? But those aren't real mice she exclaims!

Living in the desert of Las Vegas, you have to reconcile living with pest of all kinds. Like the day I was in my den, when I noticed a mass movement of black crawling across the carpet. With chilling horror it was an army of winged ants! I had never seen ants with wing, let alone hundreds of them on some intense mission to invade my house. Someone said that they could be carpenter ants, maybe from my old bookcase. Or the day I saw a roach so big it was the size of a small car. Roaches plain and simple give me the willies. They always remind me of that Dean Koontz book Whispers and the sound of whispers which were the roaches crawling. Chills! I've had to stop feeding the birds in the summer because of the attraction for the roaches. Nothing like sitting in the garden at night watching the social habits of roaches communing with each other!

This summer the main insect of annoyance was ants. One day in the pantry there were thousands of invading ants living the high life. There were ants in the pantry and ants in the bathroom going after the mouthwash and ants in the hummingbird feeder. I yelled at my husband to call the exterminator. The exterminator put these liquid vials of poison and said that it would get worse before it gets better. Well it never did get better. Thank God, I had the secret Chinese weapon, the chalk! Yes you heard me, Chinese chalk. A little known secret weapon against ants that I found one day in Chinatown San Francisco, when I had an invasion of ants doing the death march into my freezer of all places. A sage withered Chinese man in an herbal shop told me to buy the chalk, and proceeded to tell me which store to buy it in. Many many years later, I still have that same piece of chalk in it's original slender box of orange and yellow with Chinese writing on it with a picture of a bug. That chalk has been the answer to the menacing hoards of invading ants. Just outline the places you want the ants to be verboten and they vanish almost instantly. Who knows what's in it, I always use gloves and treat it like it is nuclear waste. Never know with these Chinese products, but I swear by it!

Well, back to the problem at hand, so when I saw the mouse scurrying past me I knew there must be a family of them nearby, because where there is one, there are many. I called the dogs hoping they might flush out that grey creature, but Henry was too interested in barking at the neighbor's lawn mower and Hazel didn't want anything to do with being outside. Me, I waited outside with my broom in hand until it got dark and my husband got mad, so the next voice that could be heard throughout the neighborhood was me yelling to my husband, call Dr. Death, the pest exterminator, this was going to be too big for the chalk!-Single D