Entry #12: WILDLIFE IN THE HOUSE

My mother always needed to tell people how smart she was. Within five minutes, everyone from a sales clerk to a new neighbor would learn that she had gone to Vassar, whether they asked or not. I don't know how she made it through, because she was not a bright woman, but she certainly perfected the snobbery of acting smart without actually being smart.

When I published a medical book in 1997, my mother decided she, too, was going to publish a book. At considerable expense, she self-published "Alphabestiary," a paperback of her doodles and limericks about animals from A to Z. But these were not just any animals. They had to be relatively unknown - the "aye-aye," the "nene," the "okapi" - to show how smart she was. Her knowledge of these animals was sketchy at best, but she could throw around words like "tarsier" and "loris" and impress her friends, who were all forced to spend cash for copies of her book. I imagine a lot of puzzled grandchildren were given this exercise in vanity publishing.

If you asked my mother about an animal that was not on her list - say, the "gerenuk" or the "pangolin" - she would ignore the question. If you asked her anything substantive about any animal, she would ignore the question. Her knowledge of animals was utterly superficial, but she kept up the pretense of being interested in Nature.

In my mother's mind, Natural was Good, while Chemical was Bad. The concept that both baby bunnies and the Ebola virus are Natural - and also made up of Chemicals - was too complex for her. This one-sided view of Nature may help to explain why she welcomed stray cats with fleas and various other types of wildlife into her home. When my daughter found cat poop hidden under a pillow in the living room, we adjusted our attitudes about sitting down.

Mice were constantly dying in the walls of the big old Victorian house, but my mother refused to hire an exterminator. Her sense of smell had long been dulled by alcohol, but for the rest of us the scent of Death was a good appetite suppressant.

The mice were so numerous that they ate through the wires in the back of the stove. The repairman pulled out the old stove, and there was a giant mound of mouse poop behind it. The poop was swept up, a new stove was brought in, and the mice ate through the wires again. This happened repeatedly.

The mice were especially fond of pooping in the silverware drawers in the kitchen. My mother would toss the poop out of a spoon and hand it to me as if that was perfectly normal. Well aware of hantavirus, I stopped using any utensils, pots, or pans I had not personally washed first.

The attic was inhabited by both bats and squirrels. The bats largely kept to themselves and politely let themselves out at night. The squirrels would run around above our heads, sounding as large as raccoons. There was a chance that the bats were rabid and had bitten the squirrels, but that did not concern my mother at all.

One day we arrived at the house to find my three nieces in an uproar. Somehow a baby squirrel had fallen down two stories and landed in bed with my oldest niece. Since then it had gone missing, so my nieces had moved on to playing whack-a-vole. Actually they were not whacking anything, but in the closet they had discovered an old bag of Cheetos that had expired eight years earlier, and they found they could lure little dark voles out into the middle of the kitchen with a trail of cheese snacks. The creatures definitely were not mice because they had no long tails. If we made a sudden noise, they would rapidly run backwards underneath the radiator, as if pulled by invisible strings.

Just as the voles disappeared down a hole in the floor, we heard a shriek from my youngest niece. She had been sitting quietly on the couch reading when a lump under the slipcover had come alive and started chasing her around the couch. Somehow the baby squirrel had crawled up onto the couch under the fabric, and was scratching its way around in a blind panic.

The baby squirrel fell out of the couch and ran under a china cabinet, so my father went and got an umbrella and started randomly stabbing at it. The baby squirrel started screaming, and we were started screaming at my father to stop, until someone had the presence of mind to open the front door. In time the baby squirrel made a run for it - outside where it had never been.

The big old Victorian house started to fall to pieces. My mother had vowed "not to put a nickel into it," so it was never cleaned, repaired, or heated after my parents moved to a fancy retirement place. The wildlife took over. I imagined them holding parties together in the kitchen, happily pooping all over the counters. Perhaps they invited the stray cat to use the living room as its litterbox.

The sides of the house started to rot, and the kitchen floor gave way. Holes opened up in the walls and let in the snow. Priceless fabric panels from China rotted and fell to the floor. The smell of must and mold became overpowering.

And then my mother decided she wanted to move back.