When I was three or four, my neighbors had a raccoon problem.
Of course, I didn’t know this at the time due to my aforementioned age, but it was recently brought up. My mother was talking about all the people who have since moved out of her neighborhood, but I digress.
My neighbor Roy loved gardening—he had a whole patch of his backyard dedicated to various vegetables and herbs. He would constantly chat with my family as we swam in our pool about his more recent seedlings, or his upcoming harvest.
What he was most proud of was his cucumbers. A plentiful bunch of them, really. He’d tell me all about them while I leaned up on the swinging gate built into the fence separating our yards. I vaguely remember these chats, but my mother insists I loved chatting about vegetables.
But Roy had a problem—raccoons.
They were stealing into his yard at all hours of the afternoon and evening to eat his precious cucumbers and leave their bite ridden carcasses in his lawn.
He tried everything—he left the dog out with a long enough tether to reach the garden, he put fencing around it, he sprayed the perimeter of the yard with something to dissuade the raccoons from even coming close to his cucumbers.
Day, after day, after day he’d come into the backyard and find more, and more, cucumbers masticated in the winding vines of the garden.
He eventually settled on a motion detecting floodlight. Figuring that even if he couldn’t prevent the critters from eating them, he might be able to catch them and relocate them—to this day my mother insists that Roy would never kill a raccoon, and from what I remember of him, that’s probably true.
It didn’t take long, and soon Roy was rushing from his backdoor when the light turned on to catch the rodent in the act.
Apparently, I had learned how to climb the really low gate in the fence that my mother was confident would keep my wandering toddler self from ambling off into the sunset. I was so enamored with Roy’s cucumbers, I’d been sneaking into his yard and taking two or three bites out of every cucumber I could find.
Double fisting dirt covered cucumbers, I happily munched while Roy pondered every manner he went wrong. Toddlers weren’t afraid of dogs that loved them, they could navigate easily bent fencing material, and couldn’t care less about chemical borders.
It should have ended there, but I was determined.
Over the next few weeks, no matter how I was contained, I would find my way into Roy’s garden, to gnaw on vegetation that may, or may not, be edible.
“Kathy,” he beseeched my mother, “how do I get her to stop?”
My mother tried buying me cucumbers at the store, but it just wasn’t the same. No dirt, no mystery, no adventure. I was hardly stimulated by purchased produce.
Roy and my mother were clever, I’ll give them that.
They sat me down one afternoon, and told me they’d hidden three cucumbers—store bought, though that fact hardly hampers the intrigue—somewhere in my own yard. They were out there, waiting for me to find them—and like a hound with a scent to trail, I sought them out. Single minded in the way only young children can be.
They weren’t very careful of where they were hidden, though.
And that’s the story about how I ate at least sixty ants in one bite.
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