Wasn't it a cherry tree, Mr. President?

We've lived in our charming 1947 California style stucco hot box for just about five years now. The previous owners crammed four kids into the two original bedrooms and slept in the larger front addition, which keeps an ambient temperature of about 94 degrees during the summer, even though we installed air conditioning last June. Bugglegirl lives there now, the appeal of having the biggest room outweighing the inconvenience of sleeping in a pool of sweat in summer and losing toes to frostbite in winter.

Back when the house was first built, somebody had the bright idea to plant an evergreen magnolia in the front yard so it could shade the garage. Kinda like Nicole Richie, it's beautiful, but otherwise pretty much just respiring. They also planted a California pepper, a haven for bees and a shedder to rival Buggledog, in the far corner of the back yard. So it could cool the cinder block wall back there. Two winters ago, the pepper tree caught a fungus and died. It's still there, sad and barren, one of the many projects relegated to the purgatory of our permanent "to-do" list.

Without a single mature shade tree, we're like the poster house for global warming.

I suppose I should mention the orange tree. The one I'm convinced was planted by the stoner, I mean doctor, who lived here in the eighties. Until the SWAT team raided the place and confiscated all his pot plants. We tend to attribute everything dilapidated around here to the now legendary Dr. Feelgood. Anyway, this orange tree is planted less than two feet from the back of the house. If I close my eyes, I can imagine Dr. Feelgood gazing out at the back yard, glassy-eyed, with a bag of Doritos in one hand and a tiny orange sapling in the other. Too lazy to even make it beyond the concrete patio, he immediately turns to the left and realizes that, if he plants it right outside the bay window, he won't even have to get out of bed to pick a juicy orange right from the tree. He digs a little hole, dumps in his potting mix of Miracle Gro and Maui Wowee, and dreams of the nutritious munchies to come.

When Bugglegirl was an infant, I used to take her out on the back patio for her evening bottle to escape the kiln-like temperatures inside. Sitting on the wooden bench one night, I heard a little rustling in the orange tree. My eyes were drawn to the slightest twitch of a leaf, behind which was a pair of beady rat eyes staring back at me. Suddenly the hollowed-out orange rind that occasionally appeared beneath the tree made perfect sense. I lunged, he scampered. Game on, little fucker.

We trimmed back any branches that touched the roof. We sealed up all the crevices bigger than a quarter. We set traps laced with peanut butter. But still, they came. One night I saw a big fat daddy skip gingerly along the power line from my neighbor's backyard to my roof. The orange tree expressway.

But like all things broken, malfunctioning or merely in need of attention around here, we learned to live with the nuisance. After all, there are at least a few weeks a year when there are no ripe oranges on the tree - plenty of time to lull us into complacency.

This summer, however, we've had a bumper crop. Not sure which has been more prolific - the tree or the rats. For the past month, they've been feasting all night on the choicest fruit, the juice dripping to the patio below, gluing dried up rat turds to the painted concrete. Periodically I've tried, unsuccessfully, to squirt them off with the hose. They seem to come off only when Buggleboy shuffles over there in his bare feet, wincing and whining "Uh-ooo" when the poo pellets adhere to his soles.

So this past Sunday, I stopped pretending to be some laid-back, I-don't-care-if-my-kid-walks-in-rat-crap kind of mom: I sent in Bugglehubby with the clippers.

My first pang of concern came when John McCain's son personally performed the pre-battle flyover.* Ten minutes in, Bugglehubby was dripping with sweat. It was becoming clear that he was hell-bent on waging a campaign of gruesome Shock and Awe. Quickly I washed and pressed the kids' flight suits and brushed up on the lyrics to "America the Beautiful."

By sundown, I was convinced that Bugglehubby might secretly be orchestrating the administration's war on terror through a website that only appears to be ESPN.com.

You be the judge.





It's par for the course, really. Bugglehubby is the reigning Selective Hearing World Champion. Rather than comprehending both "We need to get rid of these rats" and "We need to trim the tree," he distilled the phrases into a tidy "We need to get rid of the tree."

Impeachment hearings are scheduled to begin next Tuesday. Please bring a covered dish of your choice.


*Yeah, he's like a Marine or something. It's called creative license, so save your comments. Actually, comment away. Comment like forty-seven times. SOMEONE.