RATS

Awake at 3 a.m., no obvious reason. I try to settle myself. I notice my breathing, how my heart pounds, and work to slow the breathing down, practicing tricks that work when I’m traveling: Lying on my back, I sense my toenails, the backs of my knees, my thighs and hips, belly, breasts, spine, neck, the spaces behind my ears. I reach the top of my head. (“Dice?” my daughter would ask.) No dice. My dread is gathering – now I am more awake than asleep. The panic rises. I push it down. It rises. I push it down.

As I lie there in the dark, a voice says, Go outside and close the studio door so the rats don’t get in. I think, What rats? Besides, the screen door is shut, I checked it. I am alarmed that not only am I fully, heart-poundingly awake, I am awake and having a conversation about rats with a voice in my head.

Go outside and close the studio door.
But I’m so sleepy. If I do that, I’ll really be awake.
Shut the door!

(Ten years ago, when my father was in the hospital recovering from surgery, my mother and I went to visit him. As we were leaving, stepping out the door and into the hall, he called out, “Shut the door!” In her best gravel-voiced imitation of Jimmy Durante, she called back, “Je t’adore, aussi!”)

I am doubting, sleepy, and whiny. I want to put conditions on things:

Not at 3 a.m.
Not a conversation about rats.
Not if I don’t get to sleep.
Not if I have to get out of bed and go outside in the cold.

Not for rats.

For what, then?

Get up and do it!
Out I go in my robe and slippers, flashlight in hand, talking to the dogs, reassuring the cats, asking them why they stopped catching rats and if they might like to start again…

I train the flashlight on the windows of my studio, on the bird feeder where I so happily watch the house finches, the sparrows, the doves and the occasional jay enjoy my offerings. It is one of my greatest joys, to offer the seed and to watch the birds come. The crows even tell me when the feeders are empty.

The feeder is boiling with rats. They don’t even look up when the light catches them. They look beautiful – so sleek and fat!

I rush into the studio and quickly shut the door behind me, then shut the door I was told to close. (Je t’adore!) Then I go back to the patio and stand there shivering, horrified and amazed. I grab the hose and spray the rats, splashing the newly clean windows, scattering the seed into the rose bushes and spraying everything for several extra minutes. I am wasting water. I don’t care. In the morning I check the feeder: No wonder the birds haven’t been coming lately. The feeder is caked with dried seed and rat droppings, as is the hanging birdbath next to it.

This latest turf war is an unwelcome new dilemma. I am already overwhelmed by a growing list of dilemmas that run my life like koans: How can we live in a way that creates the world we want to live in? How can we trust that our efforts are helping when everything just seems to get worse? Why must is suffering so persistent? I spend considerable time while awake (and a growing amount while sleeping, or, as it turns out, not sleeping) considering how to live closer to nature and in respectful communication with animals. (I, in a suburban neighborhood in a not-green house where I am gratefully comfortable most of the time. I love to be outside but I don’t like being too cold or too hot or too wet or too thirsty or too sunburned.)

I am thinking up ways to eliminate the rats that gobble up birdseed, fertilizer, unripe quavas, ripe tangerines, and who, I found out today, live not in my neighbor’s cursed ivy but in my very own compost heap. In my delight at communing with the birds and the trees, and my guilty satisfaction at turning all the water-guzzling grass trimmings and shameful quantities of uneaten food into a feast for the garden I don’t have time for, I have inadvertently created an organic, cat-free rat condominium and 24-hour smorgasbord. And don’t tell me they’re nocturnal, which is what I thought until today when I took a break from writing this, went outside to sweep the porch and startled a fat gray rat nosing around the rose food less than two feet from my oblivious, sleeping cats.

I want to eliminate the rats but not what I am meant to learn from them.

Rats and mice are shrewd, tenacious, communal, adaptable. They shred things into tiny particles and attend to each one, storing each thing in its proper compartment. Because their nests are hidden, sometimes underground, and they move so skillfully in the dark, in some traditions they are said to move between the worlds, connected to the ancestors.

During the past two years, life lessons have arrived borne on the corpse of a bird or a rodent – too many to dismiss or account for. In the past week alone: a dead gopher on the hood of my car, the body of a baby mouse on the trail while walking the dogs, and of course today’s ‘porch rat’. Last Spring, a courting male blue-jay swooped into my car, a baby jay smashed into the sliding glass door of my studio (the same one the rats wanted to use), the leg of a baby oriole courtesy of my non-rat-eating-cats, and the dozens and dozens of crow and jay feathers appearing for a full year everywhere I walked, but never saw before or since.

I decide that Step 1 is to dismantle the rat condominium and remove the smorgasbord. (Step 2, contact the rats telepathically? Step 3, look in the Yellow Pages under Exterminator.) What was that about living in balance with the natural world? Having rats feasting and multiplying is definitely not balanced but neither is killing everything that annoys or threatens us. I discuss this with the gardener, who is a supremely gentle and hard-working man of great generosity. He told me once he believes that helping others is an opportunity to do God’s work and to attain a state of grace. He will come this week to clean up the side yard where the rats live. As we are talking, I say it’s a shame to have to get rid of the compost.

“Why don’t you just spend five dollars every so often for a bag of mulch”, he asks.

Good question. I mumble something about plastic bags and not wasting food, but it’s feeble and we both know it. Then he says,

“Remember the other day when you asked me to spread compost on the fruit trees?’

Something in the way he says this makes me look up at his face.

“I stuck in the pitchfork and when I lifted it out I had skewered a big rat.”

Q: When is a nuisance not a nuisance but a creature trying to survive?
A: Now.

Q: Why don’t the rats eat the peaches on my neighbor’s tree, ten feet away?
A: Because they heard him say he was going to set traps?

Q: Still, do I have to live with a burgeoning rat population in my tiny yard?
A: Apparently, yes.

Q: Will they leave if I learn these lessons well – assuming I can figure out what they are - and respectfully ask them to go?
A: I guess I’ll find out.

The gardener comes two days later. The side yard is clean and organized. I ask him if he saw any rats. “Oh yes,” he says. “When I lifted up the compost barrel a huge one ran away. Their nest was in there, underneath. In the ground there was a hole filled with babies, at least 20.”

“What did you do?”

“I covered the hole and buried them.”

I cringe. I thank him. I go to the beach with the dogs. As I meditate and pray, a feeling of immense relief sweeps over me. I don’t feel the least bit guilty. I am amazed by this. I think it must be wrong, I must be in denial, I must get in touch with the sorrow. I try hard but don’t feel it. All I feel is liberated and relieved.