Death

Yeah, yeah, I know, people put exciting events, special occasions and/or a miracle or two in their blogs but let me start off with something I've been experiencing on an almost weekly basis since a few years back: Death.

Yes, death: noun, the end of somebody's life: the end of the life of a person or animal; in art: a creature that looks like a skeleton used in paintings, stories etc as a sign of death and destruction; the end: the permanent end of an idea.

Well, the death I'm talking about is the first one. The one meaning the end of a life. You see, ever since we moved into this house, mom got a garden for her own. After that, we got trees, bushes, flowers and all sorts of plants. But then we got pests, too. Rodents. Black, grey. Whiskers. A long tail. Rats.

And we also got a nice pond filled with shiny, orange Japanese kois. And even that became a problem. See, sometimes, not often, but more often than not, when it rains, the fishes take it to their heads that they'd like a good splash and one or two are sometimes unlucky enough to land on the lawn instead of back in the pond and we find these few dead and bleeding all over the grass from their oxygen-deprived gills. And it's always my job to pick them up and dispose of them. You can't imagine how sad I felt whenever mom finds one during her routine garden watering. And disgusted. Imagine holding something hard and slimy that you know was alive and moving only a few hours ago. Nasty.

We had about 10 kois and then they multiplied so we had about 13 or 14. A few months ago we had around 20. But after the horrible incident, the "Aquatic Masacre", as I called it, we were left only 3 fishes. Somehow, a rat managed to gnaw through the PVC tube for the filtering system of the pond and the mini-waterfall stopped flowing and therefore, no air for the fish. The whole pond and its contents decayed overnight and in the morning, the smell spread through the house. We went out to see the pond turned into a revolting swamp. Spider-webs were everywhere and murderous-looking insects spawned. The water became a disgusting greyish mixture of death and decay and the poor kois were bloated and afloat in the disgusting concoction. They made me fish out the "casualties" and put them into a huge garbage bag and toss it on the pile of junk not far away. The whole picture was so horrible I almost cried and I couldn't even bring myself to take a picture of it even if I wanted to. I was relieved when I saw one or two small ones still swimming in that muck. I got the survivors out and put them back when the pond is clean again.

I thought I've seen the worst but no, it was just the beginning. A few weeks later, rats started dying in the garden. Most of them were small babies which probably lost their way and starved to death. They were tiny so mom could handle them but just today, only about two hours ago, mom called me out into the garden for something. She usually calls me if there was raking to do or she needs me to take out the huge bag of dead grass and/or leaves out to the pile of trash. And since I didn't see any dead grass and/or leaves to rake or a huge black plastic bag of any sort, I got suspicious. And I was right to be. She wanted me to scrape the huge, balding, rotting rat from out of the corner of her vegetable patch where she plants her curry leaf trees, aloe veras and lime plants. The friggin' monster was stiff and had white-ish bald spots and flies all around it. And the only tools I get from mom is a small shovel. Damn.

We have at least one dead rat a month and it's not stopping. And most of the time, it's me who cleans up these messes which include dead lizards in the house but that's not so common, thank goodness. This is what I have to deal with every two to three weeks or so and I'm relieved that that this area is so urbanised that I have as much chance for discovering a dead garden snake as I have for joining the Vienna Philharmonic.

I wish this will stop and I wish the Grim Reaper will stop using me to clean up after him. If you're trying to train me to become the next Reaper will you please at least tell me so I can be more prepared to meet your "clients" after you've given them your "service"?

Damn.