09:35am Nov 30, 1998 CST

My ex-wife was from Pennsylvania. I was from Minnesota. I met her
in Ohio, and we agreed to live a few years in Philadelphia,
and then a few in Minnesota. So we moved to Minnesota that
spring. I told her the Minneapolis summers were lovely-
usually in the eighties with comparatively low humidity. Ha!
Well, I got the low humidity part right..

Striped ground squirrels. I wouldn't wish them on any homeowner. My yard was
invaded by them. I then discovered the myriad "solutions"
that had been devised to prevent your yard from becoming a
swiss cheese colony of cute little beasts. Gas 'em, trap
'em, poison 'em. Shoot 'em. The poison worked. But I feared
for the neighbors' pets.
And not before my yard was honeycombed while I tried other
measures. The gas was interesting. But it required plugging
up all the holes. And didn't work. We have rabbits in our
Pennsylvania yard. Hole diggers and vegetable garden
munchers. But I let them alone- they're nothing compared to
striped ground squirrels.

The worst part of using the poison was finding the little
shriveled rodent bodies all over the yard.. It wasn't tall
grass or leaves that attracted them to my yard The year of
the great spring/summer/fall drought. Our grass croaked.
That summer of 1988. Temperatures hovered around 100 every
day. The sky was bright blue every day. Not a cloud. We closed
the curtains to escape the blue after a month or so..

Except when the tornadoes came.
Then came the winter...My wife wasn't enamored of Minnesota
after that. We had six foot drifts in our backyard at Easter, 1989.
And then it hit 60 degrees and flooded into our window wells,
and from there into our basement. I shoveled the drifts away
and surrounded the window wells with mounds of dirt. That
stopped it.