Wildlife in New Hampshire
I made the trek back to the Page homestead for a baby shower and a bridal shower (for different cousins, thank you) this weekend. I ate small sandwiches and lots of cake. I watched a lot of presents get opened. I went out for margaritas at Margaritas with three cousins and a cousin-to-be who officially gets to be part of the family now that he survived an outing with four Page women at once. I stayed up until midnight talking about boys and politics and who knows what else with my grandmother. I ignored the fact that she probably shouldn't be having that scotch before bed with the pain medication she was on. She knows she shouldn't drink it, but she says it helps her sleep some, and who am I to deny her that with everything else she's suffering? I'll just be the good granddaughter and make her tea and adjust her heating pad and bring her back a plate of food from the parties and let her nap and not let her see me cry. I helped her as much as I could, as much as she'd let me, and it didn't feel like nearly enough.

But enough depressing talk. Let's get on to more important subjects, such as moles. Have you ever seen one? Not the freckles (I have plenty of those), but the burrowing-in-the-ground type. More importantly, have you ever seen one inside before? I have. During the bridal shower, my four-year-old cousin Caitlin was making a tour of my gram's house (which is the lower floor of a house built into a hill) and came running out of the back bedroom (where I happened to be staying for the weekend) saying she'd seen a big furry thing. My uncle went in search of what was reportedly a mole but didn't capture it. Word traveled upstairs to the shower. A mole? Inside? It was probably just a mouse, right? Aren't moles big? I was picturing New York subway rat big. I wasn't too pumped about sharing a bedroom with something that size and furry. Later that night as I was sitting in the kitchen chatting with my gramma, my uncle stopped down to see if there had been any other mole sightings. Apparently, it really was a mole. They get a lot of anthills on the slope behind the house, but he didn't treat the grass this year because my two-year-old cousin is at the age when she will put anything in her mouth (including chemically treated grass) and killing his granddaughter really wouldn't be popular. So there are a lot of anthills, and the moles have shown up to feed on these anthills, which means they are tunneling all over behind the house. How one got inside is still a mystery. As my uncle is explaining how moles have a pointed snout and this digger claws that would keep it from moving too fast on the linoleum, I see this four-inch furry brown blob with a pointy nose dart out from behind the refridgerator, into the sewing room and toward my bedroom. The mole! Apparently his sharp digger claws really help him get moving on carpeted surfaces, though, because we lost him somewhere past the sewing room. Needless to say, I was somewhat nervous when going to bed that night. I turned lights on and off as I made my way back to the bedroom instead of stumbling along by the glow of the kitchen nightlight as usual. Really didn't want to step on a mole. I turned the bedroom light off and then turned it right back on so I could turn down my covers before getting into bed and make sure that there wasn't a mole burrowing in my covers. That wouldn't be a pleasant surprise. And I only woke up once during the night thinking I heard something with sharp digger claws trying to dig its way into my backpack. At least there was the comfort of knowing I didn't at all resemble an anthill, so the little bugger wouldn't try to eat me.