Hosta and Rabbits and Squirrels. Oh, My! by Susan Van Kirk

 

Recently, I had a battle going on in my backyard at the same time as a battle was being fought on my written pages.

 A Happy Hosta

A few weeks ago, I paid an exorbitant amount of money to have the landscaping redone around my small house. After several weeks of work, my yard looked gorgeous, but a few days later I noticed some of my Hosta was missing. This was unusual since I’ve always been a lazy gardener, and Hosta fits that bill. In fact, the Hosta I used to have before this upgrade grew abundantly and was mine for the taking from friends who had too much. Hmm. What could be happening? Early one morning, I looked through the slats in the blinds of my bedroom window. And there it was.

 

The problem.

                                                                            An Unhappy, Eaten Hosta

Three rabbits—very FAT rabbits, I might add—were stuffing their faces with MY Hosta. They must have called their relatives from yards around to feast on my expensive plants. It was a smorgasbord of delight for them. Looking through my blinds, the first thing I thought of was the title of this online blog: Writers Who Kill. However, I am not a gun-toting, violent person. Checking with some of my friends who DO garden, I discovered a spray I could use to persuade these overweight, Hosta-loving animals to leave my plants alone. And it actually worked with no bloodshed.

My landscaper had carted in a huge amount of mulch to put around a tree in the back, and it does look far better than it did. So, imagine my surprise when I discovered it wasn’t just the rabbit population that was sending out the call to their community.

 

Tunnels and more tunnels appeared overnight, dug in the mulch by anxious squirrels whose cache of nuts had been unexpectedly buried. I suppose I should have warned them that there would be mulch construction in their favorite hiding places. The word had gone out to the squirrel community that their hoard of food was in danger. Well, nothing to be done about that except cover up the tunnels eventually.

 

It occurred to me that both these communities have an excellent communication grid, unlike the small town where I live that has lost both of its local newspapers. A sad reality of American life, rural areas have become deserts of community news because various entities have bought their newspapers, destroyed their local news, and left the communities without the ability to keep up to date about the events happening in their areas. Their social news of births, marriages, and deaths, have disappeared, along with the local high school sports stories. My three children have scrapbooks I created of their high school sports careers with newspaper stories and box scores. Sadly, that doesn’t happen anymore.

 

The Medill School of Journalism ominously pointed out by the end of 2024, a third of all newspapers had disappeared. Ten companies now own half the dailies and a quarter of all weeklies. The days of newsrooms with cigarette smoke, clattering typewriters, editors yelling about deadlines, phones ringing, and static from police scanners are gone. (Pro Publica)

 

The small town of Endurance, in Fabric of Lies, my latest work-in-progress, has a newspaper going back two generations: the Endurance Register. It’s owned privately by a family that has published it since 1895. Jeff Maitlin is the editor, and he’d better get ready for a fight because a hedge fund known as the Diablo Fund is after his newspaper. Will the owners prevail, or will the newspaper end like so many others in this country, destroyed and forgotten?

 

Does your town still have a local newspaper?