I have changed. Before I moved up country, I was an animal pacifist. In many ways I still am because I regard life highly...all species of life have a reason to be and for the most part I live in harmony with the critters...but I'm not so extreme. I've learned to see things less in black and white...and more in shades of grey or rainbow colored. I'm unemployed and I work hard to grow, harvest, preserve and prepare the food for our table. I figure it's as good as making money because it benefits my entire family and allows me to be generous even though I'm not bringing home the bacon. Mother Nature is abundant and although I might not have a 100% success rate for all the seeds I plant, the weather, bugs and pestilance that I can't conquer with organic weapons leave me enough for my freezer and plenty to give to my friends. I spend alot of time bent over weeding...bent over planting, bent over cutting and pinching...and I sweat profusely under the hot sun because that is when I can work without too much bother from the mosquitos or black flies. I wander about in my garden with a yogurt tub full of homemade bug repellant smacking the leaves of the borage and beans and muttering die die die to the Japanese Beetles as I knock clusters of copulating beetles into my potion of death. Yep. I do have a streak that enjoys killing. When I was little I had a grasshopper hospital with an elevator made from a jewelry box. I brought the grasshoppers to my hospital to feed them purple sumac berries and nurse their wounds. A few times I even tore a leg off the poor things so they would need to come to my hospital. As a young adult vegetarian and student of alternative healing, I went through a period of deep remorse and guilt for what I did to the grasshoppers. Once I left suburbia, that extremist died. The first sign of it was in my relationship to ticks. The first year we lived in Maine, the ticks were unbelievable...never like that again. Stephen and I had to do checks for every walk and sometimes there were 10 or more ticks on each of us. I began to indulge a guilty pleasure. I found enjoyment in getting the ticks between my fingernails and pulling them apart. I also found I felt no guilt. Mmmm. The next step was potato beetles. They are disgusting...even worse than stink bugs. I made a bug repellant of garlic, red pepper, dish soap and crushed dead beetles because I read online that the smell of the dead of one's own species has a repellant effect. Made sense. But now as I begin my harvest in earnest, I discover a very large woodchuck is beating me to the punch...eating entire squash plants...then pumpkins and all my collard greens. The photo above is last years woodchuck. It was smaller and cute and dumb and we caught it in a have-a-heart trap within 15 minutes of setting it out. This chuck is a granddaddy.
This morning my alarm went off at 6:30...it was Stephen pulling the trigger on his 30/30. I was merry with a holiday joy thinking he got the woodchuck. And then I wondered what I've come to. The curly brown edges of guilt started on my outside leaves. I was actually celebrating a kill...an innocent creature just eating to live and I was declaring war in my heart. Fortunately it did not last long. I thought about all kinds of other animals and I thought about myself as an animal. I realized that when I include myself in the picture of the animal food web, it all makes sense. I'm only being territorial like the male hummingbirds who fight for supremacy at the feeder. Or the juvenile bald eagles fighting over a fish. Thats me...Elise...growing garden girl all pissed off because after doing all the work and planting all the extra, I'm not going to see even one pumpkin from my poor woodchuck eaten plants. I've tried to trap him...I even used gloves to pick the greens to bait him. Fresh carrot tops and spinach...lettuce and peanut butter. A regular spread. But he's too old...too smart...and too damn fat to go into my trap. The plan now is to shoot him...so Stephen hunts three times a day. While I harvested the garlic beside the squash plants, he found his way to another little garden and did a few things in there even after he was shot at. The mission if you care to accept it is to chuck the chuck...and walk away guilt free with maybe one pumpkin for a Thanksgiving pie. Meanwhile he's got me all fired up.
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