A woman dressed in gardening boots, jeans and a hoodie, her hair stuffed under a ball cap, walks across her backyard gingerly, dousing the grass with the sudsy contents of a gallon sprayer.
Her cell phone rings in her pocket.
She puts down the sprayer and checks her phone. It’s her mom. She answers.
“What are you doing?” her mom asks brightly.
“Do you really want to know?” Gardening Woman asks.
“Mmhmm,” her mom says.
“I’m spraying the yard with castor oil,” Gardening Woman says.
Silence.
“For moles,” Gardening Woman adds, for context.
“I’ll talk to you later,” her mom says.
It’s late winter. The snow has melted.
The Gardening Couple’s backyard is bursting with promise.
The grass they sowed last fall is coming on, bright green, even in the shady spots.
The maples tease them with ruddy buds.
The crocuses are croaking. Not in a morbid way. No, rather in the tree frog way: cheerfully chirping notes of yellow and purple on the fringes of the natural area, which is landscape-talk for “places they don’t even try to grow things any more.”
Finally, the Gardening Couple has almost finished renovating their raised-bed garden, which had fallen prey to a cycle that many gardeners will recognize: wood rot, which draws bugs, which draw bug-eating critters, which draws a Gardening Dog, who tears the ever-living snot out of the frames.
Board by board, the couple’s Gardening Dog dismantles the frames so thoroughly and so quickly, the Gardening Couple conjectures later, that she must have a YouTube channel on the subject.
“Hi, everyone,” she would say merrily. “Gardening Dog here. Today, we’re gonna take down these raised beds in just a few hours.”
All this happens while the Gardening Couple “works” inside.
“Where is Gardening Dog?” one of them asks blithely.
“Oh, she’s dogging around in the backyard,” the other says.
“Oh, good,” comes the reply.
Lalalala.
This is how society crumbles. Good people tend to their daily lives while the paws of destruction dig away under their noses.
This is also why the Gardening Couple is very familiar with people who work at Lowe’s.
“How’s the family?” the Gardening Woman asks someone in a red vest.
“Good. You back for more cedar boards?” her vested friend asks.
“Yep. Hey, can we have some of these doughnuts meant for contractors?” Gardening Woman asks.
“Sure! You paid for them!”
Hahaha.
Like that.
Anyway, the Gardening Couple’s new, improved raised beds, made with slotted concrete blocks at the joints — burrow into that, critters — is almost finished and ready for the planting of cool-weather greens, flowers and veggies.
Proudly, the Gardening Couple walks outside laden with shovels and dreams. They anticipate the spring day, just a couple of months away, when they will host a small gathering to celebrate the marriage of their older son and his wife. Guests will stroll through the yard, marveling at the peacefulness of their little Eden, the beauty of springtime in the Piedmont, the craftsmanship of the raised beds.
“Did you see the slotted blocks on the corners?” they’ll whisper over their plates.
“And the way they chiseled the cedar planks — which were a tad too wide — to fit the slots snugly?”
“In all my days, I’ve never seen such arugula.”
“Breathtaking.”
These are the thoughts that fill the heads of the Gardening Couple as they walk outside one sunny afternoon to finish their project.
Suddenly, the reverie is shattered.
[CLANK] “OOOOOHHHHH-NOOOOOOOOO!!! ARGGGHHHHHHH!”
The Gardening Woman drops her shovel, grips her head in her hands, falls to her knees, and screams to the heavens.
Half the yard looks like a munitions-testing ground.
Craters yawn with freshly churned dirt.
Patches of new turf lie asunder.
Muddy trenches meander like . . . molehills.
Gardening Dog bounds up, tongue lolling, tail wagging, nose crusted with dirt.
“Yo, family, check it out!” she seems to say. “I took care of those moles for ya!”
Gardening Man looks crestfallen. According to his telling, his life has been one protracted battle with moles.
He retells his war stories: how, as a kid, he helped the maintenance man at his Catholic grade school dispense of moles in the lawn with poisoned peanuts, smoke bombs and pitchforks.
Gardening Woman frowns. She is not a poisoned peanuts, smoke bombs and pitchfork sort of person. Gardening Man knows this.
He continues his epic poem, telling how the moles found him again, early in his marriage to Gardening Woman.
Fortunately, their dog at the time turned out to be a “moler” who brought family members dead moles as gifts. Gardening Man rewarded the dog with bites of steak to reinforce the habit.
Soon, the tunnels and trenches disappeared.
If the current Gardening Dog has ever unearthed a mole, which she must have, she has never shared the bounty.
The thought occurs to Gardening Woman that the mole might have gone into another dark tunnel — Gardening Dog’s digestive system — only to be reintroduced to the yard as fertilizer.
Gardening Woman thinks of mole holes, in every sense of the term. She thinks of how Gardening Dog loves to lick people’s arms and legs.
Ew, she thinks.
There must be a better way.
Gardening Woman reads up on moles. They eat grubs and worms.
Yuck.
But OK.
She looks at galleries of mole pics, absorbing the details of their faces. They have bright red button noses, which sounds cute except the rest of them look like Freddie Krueger plushies, with knife-like fingernails and scrunched-up eyes.
Mole huggers says they’re helpful creatures that aerate your lawn.
Mole haters says they’re destructive pests that ruin lawns.
Gardening Woman thinks they are both.
She is fine with moles being moles, just not where she wants people to mingle, on level ground, and praise her arugula.
She is willing to coexist.
She reads about battery-powered lawn spikes that emit a low-frequency hum, supposedly repelling moles. The problem is, they don’t work very well. Like parents who don’t love, but get used to, their children’s music rattling the walls, it appears that moles don’t love, but learn to live with, vibrating ground.
The safest and most effective way to discourage them — moles, not children — seems to be by soaking the lawn with a solution of castor oil, liquid soap and water.
Like many creatures, it seems, moles do not like the taste of castor oil.
Gardening Woman wonders why any animal that eats grubs would be put off by castor oil, but she accepts the premise and orders a gallon of pure castor oil, enough to purge the city in preparation for a world-record attempt at Most Colonoscopies in a Metro Area in a 24-hour Period. But no. According to Amazon, this is “landscaping” castor oil, a mole and vole deterrent.
Whatevs, Gardening Woman decides. Either way, we’re talking mole runs.
She mixes the oil with lavender-scented Castile soap and water and applies the concoction to the tilled up earth. Never has so much laxative smelled so lovely.
It rains for two days.
On the third day, Gardening Woman ventures out. Gardening Dog follows her to inspect the moonscape.
No new hills.
No new trenches.
Gardening Dog seems uninterested in the wasteland.
Gardening Woman makes a note to buy top soil and grass seed and start over at ground zero. There’s just enough time for grass to sprout before the gathering.
She goes to the “natural area” to check on spring buds.
When she turns around, Gardening Dog is digging again, this time in the un-oiled part of the yard.
What’s that sound? A muffled, maniacal Freddie Krueger laugh coming from under the sod?
The castor oil has worked. Sort of.
Gardening Woman scolds Gardening Dog, marches inside, finds the sprayer and silences her phone.
