New House, Old Dwellers!

Originally posted on my other blog page - http://r-sharma.sulekha.com/blog/posts.htm

New House, Old Dwellers!

The house hunters are hunting no more! 

It has been six months since we purchased our new home and settled into it with great relief. The hassles of packing and unpacking left us feeling a bit battered and bruised. Although I was compelled to stow away all of my creative ideas into an old rucksack in the garage, nothing stopped me from producing dozens of imaginary blogs during these last few months. Even as I was organizing my closets and cupboards, I conjured up several scholarly blogs on intriguing topics like – Mending Broken Teacups, Weeding the Garden, Mismatched Socks, and Burnt Food etc. During these past few months, I also received numerous notes from my friends on Sulekha asking me gently to "return back right now," or lovingly expressing "missing your blogs." I tried hard to suppress my burning desire to put aside all of my daily duties and don the hat of an amateur (or is it immature) writer.

I am happy to say that my writing cap is back on my head as of this minute, whether it fits me or not!

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Our new house came with all the usual accouterments and one added bonus—our own attached private forest! Nothing compares to having a jungle of our own, and waking up every morning to the sounds of numerous birds outside our bedroom window. The word 'private' sounded thrilling at first as I imagined myself wearing a large bonnet and picking blackberries all summer long. Little did we know that our secluded Garden of Tranquility was not reserved for us exclusively! It was already home to a few entrenched creatures that had utter disregard to the concept of land ownership. A closed real-estate deal on our part did not constitute a relocation agreement on their part! Our run-ins with the stubborn tree-dwellers were interesting, but expensive.

"MOM," roared my teenager (Nano Processor, as we call him) one morning, as he was sitting near the kitchen's bay window, eating his slightly overdone sourdough bread. Seventeen at the time, our boy's bass/baritone vocals made it sound like an emergency. It was only the fourth day of residing in our new home, and our muscles were still raw. We had seen umpteen squirrels romping in our backyard, and the animal lover in me knew that I was in Critter Nirvana! I had gushed over every bushy-tailed antic, and guffawed over numerous squirrel fights visible from my kitchen. That morning, I was a bit irritated by Nano's continuing insistence that I should get to his window immediately. Yet another squirrel prank was not going to surprise me.

"Look over there," he said pointing to an area between the 'private' forest and our backyard lawn. About five feet from our window stood a full-grown enchanting stag! He had decent sized antlers and was over four feet tall. The handsome deer was posing majestically and pausing for us to take pictures of him.

Of course, we did NOT! We could not budge an inch in sheer amazement! We live smack in the middle of a city surrounded by freeways and highways that are typically found near residential areas. Our forest is actually open to our neighbors, who in turn have a secluded garden of their own. A lone deer finding its way into an urban setting is a big mystery!

I yelled out to my husband, Mr. Micro Processor, to get the camera and start capturing all the glory. He was upstairs and had a better vantage point than we had. He promptly responded, "YES," which sounded a bit suspicious to me, as seconds became minutes, because I did not hear any follow-up questions, such as, "where is the camera again," or "is the battery charged?"

I imagined a series of lovely pictures of the handsome deer munching on our lawn, as he strolled down our front driveway and calmly crossed the street. A surprised car driver halted his vehicle abruptly to allow the deer to walk past him, and to gain his own composure.
Mr. MP came down grinning.

"So did you take the photos," I asked him eagerly, as I could imagine myself blogging one day with all those attached deer jpegs.
"Nope," he said, "the memory was out!"
"Be careful when you are outside though," Mr. MP added, "Stags are dumb animals. They can come dangerously close when they are searching for partners.”
I turned to see if he was joking! Was he saying that this Jane Doe could be easily confused for Miss Doe the deer? If my ‘walking encyclopedia’ said so, I was going to believe him!

Hardly a week had gone by when a little commotion broke out near our living room within the house. Poppy, our cat, was staring at a blank wall with great focus. From behind the wall came a frantic scratching noise. The sound was coming from a space between two drywalls (which makes for a hollow wall). We wondered if a squirrel had somehow fallen down from the rooftop into what was distinctly its death trap. It would have fallen at least 20 feet from an open dormer. "Aw don't worry," said Mr. MP-Know-All. If it is a squirrel, it always knows how to go back the way it came."
A few hours later, it was clear that this critter was clueless about its own return journey.

It was a Friday morning, and we realized that if we did not resolve the problem before evening, we would not be able to find repair people over the weekend. We had not even established that it was indeed a squirrel. Nearly six hours into the ordeal, the mystery animal behind the wall gave a melancholic chirp. It seemed to be scratching desperately for a few minutes, and then resting for extended periods to regain energy. I tried to memorize the chirpy squeal and went on YouTube immediately. In the search box, I typed 'Squirrel Noises.' Sure enough, a few thousand videos popped up with all sorts of squirrel shenanigans, from surfboarding squirrels to flying squirrels! I also learned that squirrels came in many varieties, and their chirps were as varying as the hair on their bushy tails! Luckily, I was able to locate one YouTube squirrel that produced the exact chirp I was looking for. That was good enough for me.

Having resolved the identity of the animal, I went back on the Internet to read about their intelligence! If Mr. MP was to be believed, squirrels came with onboard GPS systems lodged between their tiny ears! Not so, said one Internet article. Falling through the attic was actually a well-established tradition among adolescent squirrels, and even among some elderly ones! One website also had a photo of an unfortunate dead squirrel, which had lodged itself behind a drywall, just like ours. Its skin had wrinkled due to dehydration and starvation. The pathetic looking soul had white paint dust all over the body, which was the result of its desperate excavations. 

After seeing the depressing photo, Mr. MP instructed me to call wild life rescuers immediately. Even though it sounded a little extreme, I consented and called one such organization. "Ma'am," said the person, "we only rescue trapped Bald Eagles!" A bit embarrassed for making a mountain of a rodent issue, I decided to call a not-so-fancy drywall repairman. 

It was still surprising to me that people specialized in such narrow areas like ‘Bald Eagle rescue,’ and nothing else! Don't they get a crash course in squirrel entrapment too? It is not such a big deal!

It was already Saturday morning by now, and the poor squirrel had been without food or water for 24 hours. So I called a local drywall repairman.

"Ma'am, it is very easy. Just cut open your drywall with a sharp tool, and remove the animal yourself. Most likely, it is an adolescent squirrel. They usually like to investigate their boundaries and fall down from attic spaces," said the helpful guy. 

It meant only one thing - there was an entire family of troublesome squirrels living within our attic area!

A cursory examination of the squirrel’s exact movements indicated that it was canvassing the entire length of the wall, which meant that we had to make several holes in the wall by trial and error. If we did nothing, a dehydrated dead squirrel would make our house stinky for months. Either way, it was going to be a mess.

"Surgery on our brand new home! No way," exclaimed Mr. MP that evening. "Our expensive property is no match for a freeloading squirrel’s worthless life! Who told the rascal to share our home with us?"

Deep under his tough exterior, I knew that Mr. MP loved animals as much as I did. We bought the house knowing that we would enjoy the furry creatures around us. Mr. MP and I even pledged not to use pesticides or chemicals to kill our weeds. We were planning to grow an organic garden too.

Tearing up the foyer wall just a week after moving into the house, was tough for us, but not for the squirrel! By now, it was nibbling on electric cables for breakfast, wooden posts for lunch, and frosty gypsum for dessert. My own three square meals were not so easy to consume. Every morsel filled me with gnawing guilt. Somewhere deep down within the barrels of our house was an adolescent squirrel that was remorseful for being a disobedient child, and was preparing for impending death. How could I bite into my highly nutritious 7-grain bread laced with cilantro chutney, knowing well that insulated electric cables were not as tasty to a starving squirrel as its regular diet of those unidentified green berries atop our new backyard tree? I had watched many squirrels feeding nonstop during these last 30 hours. They all looked adorable, and I was sure that our prisoner was no different.

Sunday morning arrived, and Mr. MP was still hoping that the critter would leave on its own. Sadly, by then we could only hear faint noises from the wall. It was still alive, but barely.
That evening, our son was playing his Clarinet for a benefit concert. The recital hall was packed. As we sat through Francis Poulenc's Clarinet Sonata - the First Movement, I was thinking about our immobile critter who was hearing his own heart's last Sonata.

I glanced at Mr. MP who also appeared somber and unfocused on the concerto in front of him. Clearly, our thoughts were with our squirrel back home, as it was undergoing torture during its last hours.
It was too much to bear!

Ahimsa crossed my mind several times.

There was only one nonviolent way out of this pain - Nag!
Yes! I said NAG!

Some of its gentler versions include - pestering, bugging, grating, irritating, needling, vexing, picking on, or my favorite – driving up the wall.

Nagging rarely causes any physical pain or damage, and it always gets the job done! 

No, I was not talking about nagging the poor squirrel...although a good long nag, if delivered effectively, should be able to kick-start even the most emaciated squirrel out of its hole. I could almost imagine the animal clawing its way back up the steep 20-foot wall, grumbling and cursing all females for their uncontrollable tongues, and saying, “Can’t a squirrel die peacefully these days without being bullied to back life!”

Obviously, language barrier prevented me from nagging this squirrel out of death successfully.

I was only talking about nagging Mr. MP until he agreed to punch holes into our brand new home!

I nagged him all right for the next thirteen and a half hours…with rests in between for nourishments, just to replenish my energy. Any wife worthy of her esteemed title should be able to badger her way through her husband's tough exterior and reach his inner core, wherein dwells that soft corner for rescuing trapped squirrels by damaging his own home! I was going to drill my way to that core and tug at his heartstrings, even if it took me three days! I just hoped that I would be able to save the furry soul before it was too late!

You would have to wait for my next blog - RELEASE THAT SQUIRREL!, to find out if the squirrel lived to tell its harrowing tale to other dimwitted family members. Until then, please do not hold your breath!

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