With sewer problems come rat problems…they go hand-in-hand, don’t you know? So last Saturday, despite feeling heavy colds in our chests, Josh and I sealed off entrances on our roof. The old house was built in 1914, so there are places where the wood sags, the paint barely holds, and the little vermin cheerfully stroll into our crawl space. There is evidence they’re hanging under the house too, cute little holes being dug under the baseboards and insulation pulled down. A week ago we saw a huge rat scuttle across our alley way and dive into a patch of homey blackberries. YUCK!

Before sealing off the entrances, Josh researches ways to kill rats. He rejects poison (they die in the walls), glue traps (they die struggling to death against the powerful grip of glue), and old-school traps (they snap their little necks half the time, the other half they steal the food right out of the trap). It’s with a certain thrill that Josh chooses the T-REX RAT TRAP. Loaded up with C batteries, the cage lures the rat in and then ZAPS it to death. The problem is that neither McLindons or Home Depot carry it–despite being on their respective websites. (And by the way, it’s true about Home Depot: with economic doom nipping at their heels their customer service has never been so grand!) We decide to order the rat zapper online.

In the meantime, Josh is on the roof, upside down, with a big piece of mesh and a staple gun. My hands are numb, my feet are blue, the weather threatens snow. I can’t quite conceive of throwing my leg over the ladder and landing on the roof. Instead I perch on a rung, carefully going up an extra step, trying to rationalize away my fear. (After all, I used to climb trees as a girl, surely this height isn’t any higher then the fir tree out back?) I hand Josh tools, measurements, make notes. Our neighborhood seems loud, filled with bass that Saturday afternoon, and unfriendly. We look at our house with resignation, this wasn’t a house we thought we would be in for very long, the market wasn’t suppose to turn out this way. Now rats have moved in and we are unwilling roommates.

Before getting on the roof, before looking at rat traps, before freezing our extremities, Josh and I surveyed the destroyed bushes in our front yard. Yanked up by the roots when replacing the sewer line, an entire overgrown bush lay on our lawn. I had dismantled most of it and stuffed the branches in our yard waste bin a little at a time. Now Josh was pulling on what was left, and it was clearly rotten. In a matter of minutes a second bush lay next to the first. I didn’t think it was possible for our front yard to look any uglier. But then our inner landscapers came out; soon we were making plans, imagining a small retaining wall with flowers, rose bushes lining the ugly chain link fence that line our property, and dirt being delivered for new grass to grow. It suddenly seemed very appropriate to yank out these ugly front bushes. Besides, one of them was dead, it would have fallen over eventually, leaving us with this ugly yard. Sometimes, it’s just meant to be…