On my mind

I am on vacation. During that time, this space will feature vignettes—”short … literary sketches” according to the dictionary—written in the early ’90’s, when I had dreams of earning a living by writing. All of them are factual.

But first, a few words in follow up to last week’s item about sending care pack-ages to the Marine major in Iraq who had said, in a letter to the Pacific Daily News that an Iraqi colleague he had met had so little compared to what the U.S. troops had that he would give all care packages he received in the future to his colleague. This letter can be found on the web at .

In an e-mail I received from him this past week, the major suggested sending things like toiletries, non-perishable food-stuffs, office supplies, even items like make-up for their wives etc. “We also sponsor a nearby school so things for kids are always appreciated. And if you or your company has an old laptop they want to get rid of I am sure “Robbi” could really put that to use too,” he wrote. I plan to send two copies of the World Almanac, and of The Life of Pi. (But books should be chosen with care, lest they offend the beliefs, values of their Iraqi recipients….) Packages should be sent to: Major Stever Danyluk, U.S. Marines, Camp Babylon, Iraq, APO AE-09332, with a note that they are for the Iraqi Lt. Colonel (whose name I unfortunately don’t have with me) and his colleagues.

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Besieged

I carry on a running battle with the pests in my house, and though I’ve never felt, for very long, that I was winning, I had always felt that I was at least holding my own, until lately. Though mosquitos give me battle on occasion, my major foes have been ants—largely in the kitchen—and shrews. Seems like it doesn’t matter what I do, I can’t get rid of the ants. Or the shrews.

I have discovered that ants don’t like my dish detergent. If I squirt it around my sink, they won’t cross the line. In fact, the detergent seems to be pretty effective on contact. When I pour detergent on them, motion stops, instantly. The ants don’t wriggle for a while as they do when I pour water on them. But the problem with using detergent is that it rusts my allegedly stainless steel sink.

I did find out from my boss, just last month, that ants don’t like bright sunshine—or the heat it generates, it’s not quite clear which. Ants had finally found our office candy dish. But instead of throwing the candies out, my boss put the candy dish—candies still inside—on the hood of a car sitting outside the office. Pretty soon, the ants had all disappeared. And the candy dish and its contents duly re-ensconced on the secretary’s desk.

I’d learned earlier that one doesn’t discard food just because the ants have found it. The ants had invaded a private store of cookies a summer roommate kept in her bedroom, but instead of throwing them out, she put them in the refrigerator. After the cold had immobilized, if not killed, the ants, she took the cookies back out, brushed off the chilled ants, and, now that I had found her out, offered me one. They’d done that all through her childhood, when her family went camping, she explained.

The weird thing about ants, though, is their behavior around rainwater. Because I use rainwater for all my cooking, and dip it from the bucket with a glass measuring cup, the cup is a permanent fixture on my counter—usually with at least an inch of water in it. Well, the ants congregate under the cup. Constantly. As though the reflection of the water through the glass turned them on. Sometimes the ants get eager, and they climb the walls of the cup, come down the inside, and take a swim in the water. On occasion they’ve even climbed into the bucket itself.

Even so, the constant warring has become routine. Until the morning I found ants floating in my coffee. I don’t like bright lights when I first get up, and since I know where everything is in my kitchen anyway, I’ve come to rely on the 5-watt night light to find my cup, fill it with rain water, put it in the microwave, and measure in the instant coffee after the microwave beeps. So I hadn’t paid attention to the measuring cup, or even really looked at the coffee cup as I stirred in the instant. It wasn’t until I had taken a few sips that I finally noticed these funny irregularities on the surface of my coffee. I pay a lot more attention to the ants’ whereabouts these days.

The battle against shrews, though, is fiercer. I don’t feel quite as forgiving, as tolerant, toward them. But it’s an on-again off-again affair, because the best weapon I’ve found is glue traps and I hate having to dispose of them once they’ve trapped a shrew, so I don’t always have them set. The problem is that the damn things are still alive. And killing is no fun—I usually hit them over the head with a two-by-four.

So I always have to gird myself, before I put down new traps, knowing what I’m letting myself in for if they do what they’re supposed to. The other problem with shrew traps is that they also trap innocent geckos, but more on that later.

As I said, I thought I was holding my own, until lately. I’d put down some D-con poison, because I was sick of bopping shrews on the head. I’m always afraid the shrews will turn around and bite me when I pick up the tray. And I have to do the actual killing outside, on my stoop, because sometimes the blood squirts out beyond the tray. And that means having to wash the blood off afterwards, which is also a drag.

Last month, during one of my habitual midnight treks to the kitchen for a drink of water, I was stopped by this dark form on the floor, near the D-con. Good, I thought. In the morning it will be dead and I’ll throw it out. No need to play executioner. And not wishing to disturb it, I went back to bed without my drink of water. But in the morning, it wasn’t there. Nor was there any other trace, evidence, that it had died—at least inside the house. I should have taken my two-by-four and killed it then and there.

A week or so later, I was peacefully eating dinner and watching the evening news on TV, when to my horror a grey furry snout appeared from among the pile of papers sitting nearby. A damned shrew had had the effrontery to actually come up on my dining room table cum desk—while I was sitting right there! And it’s not as though it was dimly lit—I don’t watch TV (or eat dinner) in the dark. It had gotten there, apparently, via the shelves I have sitting next to it that hold the phone, the radio, my crossword puzzles. That was definitely a score for their side!

Within days I had another encounter. It was mid-morning, and I was heading for the bathroom when I felt something furry underfoot. (Inside my house, I walk around barefoot.) I had nearly squished a shrew, pulling my foot back just in time. And then was too shocked—a shrew, in the middle of the hall, in broad daylight?—to get my trusty two-by-four in time to kill the stupid thing. If I hadn’t let instinct prevail, I suppose I could have stepped on it properly , but what if it had bit me? At any rate, another score for their side.

Finally, I scored a victory. A double one, in fact. The glue trap claimed another victim, and I figured out a less gory way to finish it off. Now I put them in a paper bag, take them outside, and then dump a cinder block on them. No chance of being bit, no need to look at the “victim” while dealing the death blow, no blood spatters. Chalk one up for my side!

Gaily, almost, I replaced the shrew trap, and wouldn’t you know it, on the very next day a big, friendly gecko got stuck on it! I was so upset I even called a friend to ask if he knew of any way I could get the gecko off without killing it. He didn’t. It was all I could do to walk by the spot in the hall until the gecko finally died. The reason I didn’t throw the trap out right away is because there’d once been both a gecko and a cockroach on one, and a shrew got stuck on it anyway.

Two days later I awoke to find the shrew trap a couple of feet down the hall, and the gecko no longer there. Are shrews carnivorous, I wondered, as I put the trap back into position? This morning, the trap had moved again. There are a couple of hairs on it, but I can’t, in all honesty, tell if they’re mine or the shrew’s. Nothing else. More disconcerting is that the empty pail sitting under the faucet in my bathtub, which I’d forgotten to refill with tap water before the water gave out yesterday, was overturned. Did the creature come up out of the drain pipe? Was it really a shrew? Or am I plagued with something more sinister? Whatever the answer, I fear I’m losing the battle.

(The writer is a librarian by profession, and a long-term resident of the CNMI. To contact her, send e-mail to ruth.tighe@saipan.com.)