Crabgrass and Mildew and Bears..

... Oh, My!

When I first moved to Westchester, I was happily delusional about life in the suburbs. As a lifelong city girl, my idea of the great outdoors was a Second Avenue burrito joint with seasonal curbside dining. I have come to love Westchester now for its good schools and laid-back lifestyle, not to mention its serene landscapes and rustic beauty. But I have also found that daily life here can frequently involve Mother Earth’s more unattractive aspects —things like predatory animals and inconvenient extremes of weather and vegetation. For me, nature has turned out to be one of those things that looks pretty, but is best appreciated from a distance. Kind of like marzipan.

For example, when we lived in a Murray Hill high-rise, my husband and I thought of snow as a clean and sparkling novelty, something that a friendly army of men in coveralls would sweep away before we went to work. In Westchester, I would come to see snow as a dreaded and crippling event that closed schools and made country roads slick and impassable. Snow would become my mortal enemy, as it kept me trapped inside a drafty house with stir-crazy children and a dwindling pantry. Deprived of the building employees we had come to love, my husband would eventually venture out alone, valiantly risking slipped discs and cardiac arrest to shovel the driveway himself. What’s worse, snow is usually accompanied by its even more insidious sidekick—ice—which I have come to regard as the first step on the long and dreary road to hip replacement.

As seasoned suburbanites, we have become familiar with all sorts of climactic complications. We have had to deal with mudslides and ice dams and rampant eruptions of mildew, mushrooms, and lesser known forms of fungus. Soggy basements have become an expected part of our spring-time routine. During one particularly strong windstorm, we sat and watched helplessly as a tree came down on our designer swing set, instantly reducing it to a pile of pricey kindling.

But none of these things can compare to my least favorite part of nature in the suburbs: critters.

I had somehow expected animal life in Westchester to consist of nothing but happy squirrels frolicking on my lawn, while bluebirds smiled indulgently from above.

The reality turned out to be bears hanging out in front of my daughter’s preschool, and skunks slam-dancing into our garbage cans. I have come face-to-face with feral cats who spit at me from behind my carefully managed hydrangea bushes. Incredibly, there are coyotes living in the hills near my home. It’s bad enough to hear their demented howling at night, but it’s even worse when they’re out and about during the day. To spot a coyote in broad daylight is to see it for exactly what it is: an ill-conceived cross between a house pet and Satan.

Not that the animals are at fault. It is my husband and I, with our misguided pioneer bravado, who have encroached into their neck of the woods. Still, we can’t help but be troubled by the fact that forest creatures keep dropping in on us … and staying. More than once we have stayed up all night, listening to squirrels as they frolicked in the attic with our out-of-season clothes. We have had ill-fated dinner parties that featured dead mice fragrantly decomposing behind our dining room walls.

Insects have also become a tiny but annoyingly constant fact of life. Once every year, an army of ladybugs will hurl their tty-bitty bodies against our house in a pointless but ferociously cute frenzy of invertebrate aggression. And there was one awful year that a crabby colony of late-summer yellow jackets invaded our laundry room, reproducing like mad and gorging themselves on Liquid Tide.

But of all the creatures that have passed through my home, none has ever given me the full-body dry heave I experienced on finding out that we were infested with bats. During the day, they were repulsive but harmless houseguests, hanging by their creepy little bat feet under the eaves of my porch. But at night they would fly away from the house in a perfect horror movie swarm, making lazy Transylvanian circles in the sky.

When I called someone from wildlife control to deal with our infestation, it turned out he was not so much an exterminator as a relocator: He merely removed them from our home and resettled them elsewhere. I half expected him to drive my bats away in a late-model Volvo wagon while regaling them with stories about the virtues of neighboring school districts and restaurant recommendations. Relocation, we would learn, is an imperfect solution: Bats are homing creatures and, once they’ve established residence, they can find their way back to your house by virtue of its smell, which is nearly impossible to change. (“Try cooking,” was my husband’s helpful suggestion.) It may be cold-blooded, not to mention environmentally insensitive, to admit this, but I had hoped for a more drastic and permanent remedy to the bat situation. I recognize how valuable bats are (you can save your stamps) and that they eat tons of bugs. But they unnerve me and therefore, I wanted them gone—for good.

This is not to imply that I am heartless when it comes to nature. Instead of killing spiders, I carry them outside, where I tenderly wish them luck and set them free. I avoid eating meat as much as I can, choosing to replace it with a diet based on fruit, vegetables and mass-produced pas-tries. And I spend a considerable amount of time selflessly caring for Jesse, our sweet lumbering doofus of a Labrador retriever. In my house, we are not so much a family as a small, congenial cult, all of us sharing a single-minded devotion to the happiness and well-being of this one black dog. Of course, Jesse is not a wild animal—he is a pampered suburban child with a big heart and a limited attention span. It is doubtful he could survive in the wild, given that he has a sensitive stomach, recurring eczema, and a mild anxiety disorder (he suffers from a crippling fear of water, the basement and any sudden gust of wind that comes at him from behind). He is a 90-pound sissy with a down-stuffed bed and a toy chest full of rubber lamb chops. This dog has no connection to his proud canine ancestors, no sense that he was bred to hunt and retrieve his prey. When we walk Jesse around the local pond, he will trot happily past the geese and ducks, pausing only to attack a grease-stained napkin that may float by. We have sucked the nature right out of this dog, which is why it came as such a shock one morning when Jesse lurched into a neighbor’s bush and came out with a big goofy smile and a bird in his mouth.

I can’t explain why, but the sight of my big gentle boy acting like a natural-born killer completely unhinged me. I began to hop and flail like a madwoman, waving my arms in big spastic circles and shrieking at him to drop the bird. My crazy display unnerved the dog, which was just as well—he had begun to look a little confused, as if he couldn’t quite figure out the next step in his murderous plan. He spit out the bird and then swaggered into the house with a slow, cocky stride and a sly “Who’s your daddy?” grin on his face.

His brief stint as a wilderness beast gave Jesse a quick and entirely unprecedented surge of alpha dog machismo. He spent the day striking manly poses, asserting himself as undisputed king of the center hall colonial. He attacked his morning ration of toilet paper with more gusto than usual, flinging it across the room in a happy frenzy of testosterone and slobber. But even as he covered my kitchen floor in a thick carpet of Char-min and dog drool, I couldn’t blame Jesse for making such a mess.

After all … it’s just his nature.