by Margaret Radisich Sleasman

Created on: November 03, 2011

Ugh, whoever thought such cute little things would be such a nightmare?  When we moved to the country on our little 7 acre plot of land, the only tree on it was an apple tree so when the forestry service had a tree sale, we were ecstatic.  We bought hundreds of pine, fir, and spruce seedlings.  These were sticks with a little root attached.  The next few days we were busy planting them all over the property and in the next couple of years my boys (not so innocently) mowed over at least a third of them. 

I am sad to say that many of them survived and grew; sad because we were kept busy raking needles for the next thirty years and with the grown trees, came the squirrels and chipmunks.  Living in the country means you are going to have field mice, so we thought that was what was running around in our walls.  We faithfully put poison under the house, but we still had much activity in the walls - this activity sounded like large animals of some sort - maybe possums or raccoons, but much too big for mice. 

We had one really cute chipmunk that would hop from tree to tree and terrorize our dog, but you know, he was so cute and our dog was getting exercise by jumping and trying to climb the trees to catch him - quite comical to watch actually. During certain times of the year he would busily drop pine cones onto the deck and then retrieve them - taking them somewhere unknown to us.  Isn't nature grand?  Sometimes he disappeared for a while so we thought he went to the neighbors, but in reality he was at a meeting with the others in Local Rodent Union, Chapter 72 planning our demise should we try to outsmart one of them.

One day I bought a bag of flour and a bag sugar; I set them in the pantry on the floor and forgot about them.  a couple of nights later, I went in to grab a can of dog food without turning the light on.  My hand touched some cool white powder so I turned on the light.  The top of the flour sack was ripped open and flour was tossed all over the pantry.  This is not what mice do, so I told hubby if he saw a squirrel covered in white powder, he was to shoot it.  Our chipmunk is much faster than a speeding bullet, so he began investigating how to get rid of him.  Our local feed and garden shop manager snickered when hubby said he wanted something to get rid of our chipmunk; he said, "You know you don't have only one, don't you?"  If you have trees, you probably have a few

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