I expected nothing in return for this valor.  Sure, it would have been nice if she would have directed me to a mother lode of gold, but I was content watching the rare pileated woodpecker that she’d send to my yard every so often.

            But somewhere along the line I crossed her and now I’ve gone from defending her to defending myself against her.

            I should have seen this battle brewing. Maybe it started on my first day at The Nature Conservancy. Humming “Kumbaya” as I was driving to the office, I approached the curve near Eden, Illinois when a blue bird flew kamikaze-style directly into my fender. It dropped to the asphalt; dead as Rod Blagojevich’s political career.

            “That’s not a very good start to your mission of protecting nature,” I thought to myself with some naiveté.

            Retaliation started almost immediately. Moles appeared in my yard making it as pocked as a teenager’s cheek. They also undermined my newly-laid brick sidewalk causing cave-ins.

            I was more annoyed than mad when the invasion began. I was confident that, when it came to man versus mole, the two-legged species would prevail. I went to the hardware store and purchased my armaments.  Smoke bombs, those sound effective; poisoned peanuts, a deadly treat; surface traps, I see them all over the golf course.

            With the bombs dropped, the peanuts poured and traps set I figured I had kissed goodbye to the mole problem. They never would expect an attack on three different fronts. Little did I know that moles are an agents of the devil and rules the underworld that is my lawn. Nothing can stop them.

            I upped the game by purchasing vibration sticks at $25 a pop that were “guaranteed” to drive moles batty and out of my yard. I commissioned Dead Bug Doug to saturate the lawn with deadly chemicals. And still the moles marched.

            Feeling let down by the commercial products, I resorted to voodoo. I was told Juicy Fruit gum, mothballs and even whiskey placed in the mole runs would oust the critters. No deal.

On a moon-lit night I stood in the yard swigging from a bottle of Old Crow, howling insanely and unzipping my pants. I was told putting human urine in the runs would repel them. When it didn’t I was deflated and realized the moles had won. I raised my zipper and the white flag, conceding defeat.

            But Mother Nature didn’t accept the offer. Instead, she sent a new menace my way – the squirrel.

            With the lawn under foreign occupation, the siege on my house was now afoot. Squirrels began eating away at my front porch. They’d gnaw strips of paint off its surface. I repair the damage but the squirrels would return and undo my handiwork.

            It was time to bring out the big guns – literally. I borrowed a friend’s pellet gun and took aim at the porch-chewing critter. I plugged it twice and it scurried into a hole in a tree. Peeking in, I saw it lying prone on its back. Sweet victory.

            I returned a few hours later and, to my surprise, a squirrel’s head popped out of the hole. “This couldn’t be,” I muttered. I thought of the main character in Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Black Cat.” Was the entombed beast going to expose my crime to the authorities or was I going insane?

To finish the job a brought out a blowgun, but when I looked in the hole again, the squirrel was dead.

            It seems with his last dying breath he’d called in another solider and whispered, “You must keep the battle alive.”  It has. The assault on the porch continues and squirrels watch my every move.

            I go into my garage and one sits atop the dog food bin. I wake some mornings to see another just inches from me, separated only by a window screen. They taunt and they haunt me. They know that I can’t stop them as their ranks are legion.

            I call upon you Mother Nature to stop. You’ve won. You are powerful and I can’t escape you. Had I’d of known all of this when I was younger I would have become an astronaut happily float around in the international space station away from your grasp. Of course, I would have been the idiot who let in the pesky housefly before the hatch was battened.

(If you know how to get rid of moles or porch-eating squirrels, then share you secrets below)