The “Kids” are Alright (If You Don’t Count Coffee Grounds, Twist Ties and the Rat)

I’m often told that my parents sound like they were very interesting people. I suppose they were. At least, they were interesting, if not a tad puzzling, to a neighbour of theirs one summer day many years ago. He had recently bought the house across the street from their place and had a perfect view of their backyard.

My parents didn’t have grand plans for their retirement. Like most couples, they’d had a few bumps along the road over the years but had settled into a comfortable, almost enviable, rhythm together. They traveled a bit here and there, went out for meals, puttered around the house and spent time in their garden. They shared jokes and quips that only people from their generation could understand.

When I moved out, they got a dishwasher and a colour TV and raised a Union Jack in the backyard (What was that all about?).

Dad was often seen outside mowing the lawn, making minor improvements here and there, fixing the sprinkler, adjusting the hoses so the sprinkler ran just so, while my mother puttered around on the patio or in the kitchen.

Shortly after he retired, my father went through a bonsai phase. He uprooted my mother’s shrubs, cut their taproots, replanted them in shallow saucers, trimmed them of excess foliage and, voila: bonsai trees.

He made a little shelter for them out of scraps and left-over pieces of wood that had collected for years under his workbench. He arranged little pebbles around the base of the trees, placed them on the stand beside the patio and tended them religiously. These were known as the Bonsai Years.

Some garden-wise acquaintance from the bus (my mother didn’t drive and took the bus a lot) had told her that coffee grounds were great for plants, that they kept pests like nematodes away. From that day forward it was as though she’d been given free reign: we’d find them everywhere. She’d drop the grounds, filter and all, into the garden around the strawberries, around the trunk of the plum tree, in the flower pots and planters by the front stairs.

It was a well-established fact that the bonsais were out of bounds, but that didn’t stop her. She sprinkled coffee grounds around those as well. I guess she figured fair was fair because – technically speaking – the bonsais, in previous configurations, had once been hers.

I tried to appeal to her. Surely her friend hadn’t said to dump the whole kit and caboodle, and would she please do everyone a favour: if she must, would she please just deposit only the coffee grounds, sans filters?

Then it escalated. We started to find tin can lids, disposable forks, tea bags, and twist ties mixed in with the coffee grounds around the plants.

My mother liked to have a little fun with us: nothing like some good old-fashioned button pushing to get one’s point across.

It wasn’t out of the ordinary to see the odd raccoon noshing on plums, but on coffee grounds? And this was after it occurred to her to plant cabbage and parsley in the flower beds out front (which she promptly and silently pulled when a complete stranger suggested that a dog might come by and lift its leg on the cabbage).

My father was a smart man. He was insightful and kind. One could say he was always in control, composed. A Prairie boy who had dispatched his share of gophers and rabbits, he went on to experience an anti-hunting epiphany in his early teens that involved a dying rabbit and forever changed his outlook on hunting. He became opposed to hunting for sport. He loved nature and all animals, and believed in the philosophy live and let live. With one exception: Rats.

He knew full well that it was dangerous to interfere with animals of any kind unless you knew exactly what you were doing. But something went awry one particular day shortly after the new neighbour moved in across the street.

My father was digging in the garden when he turned around and saw a rat looking at him. There had to be something wrong with it in the first place, out in the open like that, in the middle of the yard, eating coffee grounds and rotting plums. It was something you don’t often witness, or at least, it was something he wasn’t used to seeing.

He swore this rat was cognizant: looking back at him defiantly as if to say, “What’re YOU lookin’ at?”

Well, you just can’t have a rat standing there staring at you.

He would have been the first to tell you that if you are going to kill a rat with a shovel you’ve got to aim well. Strike once and make it count.

He swung the shovel and smacked the rat, but he only managed to clip it and make it mad. Damn mad. It turned on him and latched onto his pant leg. Obviously, this was something he hadn’t banked on. You hear about this kind of thing, but never quite believe it until it happens to you.

So my Dad started jumping up and down on one leg, and tried to shake off the rat. He started hitting himself in the shin with the shovel and still couldn’t dislodge the rat: a big brown Norwegian house rat that had to be loopy to begin with, all fired up on caffeine and fermented plums.

“Rabies!” he yelled to my mother who was in the house and oblivious to the emergency. “Close the door, damn it! Rabies! Rabies! Damn it all to hell!”

That evening, they both got on the phone with me (if they had  a story to relate, it wasn’t unusual for Mum to call me from the kitchen phone and for Dad to pick up and join us on the extension in the den) and  I got a stereophonic, blow-by-blow description of the incident and what followed.

Somehow, the rat unhinged itself from my father’s pant leg and shot under the porch. My father’s skin was unbroken. Sadly, the rat’s wound was fatal, but the ugly business wasn’t quite over; Dad still had to crawl under the porch and retrieve the body. Even though it was just a rat, Dad expressed mixed feelings when he recounted the experience. How could something that had been so loathsome when alive be so forlorn looking in death?

When I pulled into my parents’ driveway the very next day, their new neighbour met me at the car. The expression on his face was priceless. I knew instantly that he had witnessed the whole thing but hadn’t understood about the rat.

All he’d seen was my father hopping around in the garden striking himself in the leg with a shovel and swearing a blue streak:  “It’s got me. Bastard’s got me, damn it. Get off! Close the doors, close the doors! Damn it, woman, where are you?”

As the neighbour approached me, he tilted his head commiseratively and said in a low voice, “Your parents doing okay?”

Photo Credits

“Dwarf Japanese bonsai” Wikimedia Commons.

“Coffee Grounds” selena marie @ flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

“Un p’tit serpent noir” Engage toi @ flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

“Rat” Wikimedia Commons.

Recent Margaret Blackwood Articles:

• Leave Beacon Hill Park Alone
• It's the Thought that Counts
• Being Thankful
• Looking Forward, Looking Back
• Don't Call Me Ma'am