Deluge
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How can a rainy spring near the ocean make you feel? Commentator Carol Wasserman. "It has rained for weeks. It will rain forever. Nothing will ever change. We will grow spongy in the damp. And after our houses are consumed by rot and weather we ourselves shall wake one morning, punky and rotten. Meanwhile, mice and squirrels are running the floorboards overhead. If it isn't one thing, it's another. We are being persecuted by nature itself. Which resents our lives indoors. It wants to rot the corner boards and dissolve the sills. It wants to strike the roof peak with lightning and send us out barefoot into the wet night. It sends squirrels to chew through the antique wiring. It causes mice to die in the walls where they putrify and stink. A smell familiar to inhabitants of old houses which is best described as dirty diapers mixed with wildness and fur. It resents our walls and our storm doors. It does not want us to sleep deep and heedless in some secure bed. Which is how I find myself climbing the stairs with a box of moth balls in my hand. 'It is a violation of federal law',it says, 'to use this product in a manner inconsistant with its labeling. NOT for use to control squirrels, bats and birds in the home.' I pour the pleasant smelling poison down a knothole in the floorboards and underneath a pitch in the old roof.

The next day the house is quiet. I am a felon with a spare room full of toxic fumes. But, I remember when the world was orderly and smelled of naptheline. And so, I feel nostalgic rather than guilty and strong enough to wait out a few more weeks of drizzle and cold inside the shelter of freshly silent house.

Carol Wasserman lives in South Wareham, Massachusetts.