The Wild Life of the Suburbs

I am the Cinderella of the suburbs.

Lured by my Broadway-esque yearnings for my Prince Charming (where for art thou, Jon Hamm?), reptiles, rodents and birds alike regularly descend upon our suburban castle for a little Alan Menken-scribed sing-along.

But these forest friends aren’t buffing my dishes clean with their fluffy tails or sewing me fabulous dresses from old burp cloths – they’re eating all my food, mating in my closets and relieving themselves on my floor like a bunch of inebriated frat boys.

When we lived in the city, we had our share of vermin – like the opossum who became my own personal jack-in-the-box by popping out of the garbage can every time I pitched the trash. Or the squirrel who loitered in our back staircase and went Christmas Vacation on us every time we opened the door.

But living the burbs is a whole new Wild Kingdom. While we live in a neighborhood, we’re also surrounded by acres of cornfields that house a menagerie of creatures that need some place to hang out when the combines take out their natural habitat.

Kermit is a pervert

Our first interaction with nature occurred when we moved into our house. Our new home was “blessed” with a cesspool of a koi pond in which cute little frogs cohabitated.

Cute until mating season. If you’ve never heard a bullfrog’s mating call, it’s a louder version of Sofia Vergara getting it on with a tornado siren. And frogs apparently down handfuls of Viagra and Red Bull as it goes on the entire night.

At seven months pregnant, I couldn’t sleep through the night as it was, and hearing the action at the froggy single’s bar was maddening. Every night, at two in the morning, I would run outside with a flashlight and my huge stomach to chase away the perverts.

Our backyard had become the epicenter of the frog porn industry – the southern California of the swampworld. And like any good porn stars, these frogs couldn't care less about doing it under a flood of lights or being watched by an audience, least of all a crying pregnant woman.

Sodom and Gomorrah only lasted one spring as I forced my husband to fill in the pond that summer. Yep, that’s right, frogs – you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

Mickey has some guts

Living next to a cornfield means we usually have one mouse visitor every autumn, which we easily catch. This fall, however, the mice have grown spines of steel, which I can only blame on the GMO-laden corn they’ve been eating.

It started when I noticed a couple of kernels missing from the 4-year-old’s hand-crafted popcorn kernel mosaic. Tuesday night, a few more kernels were gone. Ok, she’s four, I reasoned. She has yet to master the art of glue. By Wednesday, every single kernel – all 50 plus of them – had disappeared from her artwork. That’s when I knew.

“KT, please tell me you picked off all the kernels.”

“No, mommy. Why would I do that?”

“Oh my god! Oh my god!” I screamed, running down the steps. “We’re infested! Fend for yourselves, children – I’m moving into the Drury!”

Instead of spending my nights in mouse-free luxury, we set up traps to get the little guy.

In the morning, we had captured our unwelcome visitor. In fact, every trap we had set was accessorized with little mouse carcasses. We didn’t just have a mouse – we had a coven or tribe or whatever you call a Hoarders-level group of rodents. We are officially disgusting.

Yet, the biggest risk taker was the baby mouse who ran across our living room and hid underneath our Golden Retriever. A Golden Retriever who regularly leaves headless baby rabbit corpses strewed around our backyard for us to step on.

We prepared ourselves for the carnage, but instead Keely yawned and stretched, trapping the mouse baby. So the husband and I laid a glue trap next to the dog (Yes, PETA – yell all you want about the inhumanity of a glue trap. But if your droppings can cause salmonellosis in my little girls, Geneva Convention protocol no longer applies to you), woke her up, and let the little mouse run straight to her demise.

When the zombie apocalypse finally happens, guess who will keep the colony in mice casserole? This mom, expert huntress!

So there are no fly characters in Disney movies?

Finally, the flies. Recently, we noticed these big purple flies in the house. They were annoying, but incredibly sluggish so this sluggish mom could take them out easily with a fly swatter.

Then one day, we came home and found hundreds of dead flies around our window. The next day, we found another mini-Jonestown in our entry way. Another day, another round of mass casualties in the living room. The only reason I could see for this mysterious plague was that unbeknownst to me, I was an Egyptian pharaoh enslaving a bunch of Israelites.

In reality, the flies are the phenomenon known as “cluster flies.” Trapped indoors, they all die within one or two days. So when asked by their moms, “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?” the answer for cluster flies is apparently, “Damn, straight!”

These vermin are just the tip of the iceberg – we’ve had birds that snuck inside to use our house as their bathroom, the squirrels who decided to party in our attic, and the termites who considered my living room lunch, which we never noticed until my hand went through the wall one day.

Rapunzel has Pascal. Cinderella has Jacques and Gus. Jasmine has Raja. Me? This queen and her two little princesses are stuck in our castle with horny toads and flies with no will to live.

^{Photo: iStock}