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Our daughter has squirrel problems. You might be thinking that everyone with a backyard and a tree has mischievous squirrel problems. But her problems are monumental. A squirrel fell through the air into her house.

For years her home has been the squirrel mecca of the neighborhood. She does not feed these visitors, but she does have a bubbling pond, lush trees, moist flower beds and sturdy lawn furniture.

The squirrel army has driven her crazy by chewing up everything in sight…her lovely orange patio chairs, wicker couch, the awning over her deck, a patio umbrella and more. Plants in her garden disappear overnight and tree limbs fall. Her yard is squirrel mayhem.

I must note that squirrels, like rabbits, have teeth that never stop growing. They need to continuously file down their teeth by gnawing on hard objects. Our daughter’s yard appears to be their favorite place to perform these necessary dental functions. I suggested she might strew giant squirrel chew toys around her yard and deck, perhaps PVC pipes.

The squirrel situation peaked last weekend. She was gone overnight and came home to discover the screen to her open kitchen skylight on the middle of the kitchen floor. Her immediate thought was a burglary, and her wise reaction was to call the police and wait outside.

Madison’s finest arrived promptly and searched the house. No burglar was found cowering in a closet. However, the frame on her patio door was chewed to ribbons and a large hole was gnawed through the screen of an open upstairs window.

The police declared the intruder was a squirrel. He then said, “We don’t do squirrels”, and promptly left the scene. Not wanting to have a squirrel taking up residence, our daughter took up a neighbor’s offer to bring over her dogs. The canines did a good sniff through all three floors of the house, and no squirrel was flushed out.

Confident that the house was safe, our daughter called her insurance company about the ruined, 3,000 dollar patio door. “Your policy does not cover any animal damage” was the bad news from the insurance lady. For most of us, what our insurance policies do cover could be written on a postage stamp.

Our daughter is being remarkably upbeat after having a squirrel fall through her skylight and chew its way back to nature. It could have been a human intruder or a raccoon. A raccoon would not have exited but would have opened all the kitchen cupboards and had a feast.

The moral here is that squirrels and insurance companies always have the upper hand.

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The famous French architect, Le Corbusier (1887- 1965) once stated “A house is a machine to live in”. A pioneer in the modern movement in architecture, Le Corbusier declared the excessive decorative elements of Victorian dwellings and the flamboyant curves of Art Noveau to be things of the past. He stripped his home designs of decorations and doodads making them sleek and simplified.

I am a fan of his buildings which still look modern in this new century. However, I have a much different perspective on his famous words. A house is a machine, but it must be remembered that all machines break down. The Victorians had their upstairs and downstairs staffs to maintain their convoluted homes. My husband and I love being homeowners, but, sans staff, we are on our own to run our modern home.

A friend of ours once summed up the homeowner’s dilemma perfectly: “Having a house is like taking care of the Golden Gate Bridge. As soon as it’s finished being painted and repaired, it’s time to start all over again.” A home plus the yard it stands on generates a never ending “to-do” list.

Last week alone, the handle fell off the hot water faucet, the paint on the porch started peeling and the air conditioning stopped doing its thing. Our house, our machine for living, is again up and running, but so are we. There are days when we feel like Alice in Wonderland when the Red Queen says to her, “My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place.”

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Please note: This is my once a year political blog for the 4th of July. Every other week, I stay true to my original intent to make an upbeat, happy moment of reading. But I am serious about my love of living in a democracy.

This 4th of July finds our country more deeply divided than ever. It is not hyperbole to say that America’s democracy is in danger. A sizable number of the population has embraced the lies, misogyny and racism that is spewed out 24/7 by the far right. Those who favor this cruelty and authoritarianism would like to think of themselves as super-patriots, decent people. And they often use a manipulative technique when ending one of their hatefests. They try to make cruelty acceptable by saying, “Let’s agree to disagree.”

In my opinion, for the sake of our freedoms, I think it is important to NOT agree to disagree. I will take a stand against anyone who:

• Takes food stamps away from hungry children.
• Believes that guns can solve all of America’s problems.
• Wants to stop marriages between loving couples.
• Takes voting rights away from groups of people they disagree with.
• Thinks health care is only for those who can afford it.
• Believes name-calling and vitriol should take the place of civil discourse.
• Wants their religion taught in public schools.
• Believes that hatred and cruelty are patriotic virtues.
• Wants to replace democracy with a dictator.
• Thinks global climate change is a hoax.

Thurgood Marshall’s words ring with truth: “Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on.”

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The other day I did something so incredibly idiotic that it would rate a 10 on the stupidity scale. The only excuse I can come up with is that people are creatures of habit.

My disaster began when I decided that the doors to the cats’ apartment downstairs needed a paint job. My husband had originally bought and installed two louvered, bifold doors to keep the cats secured in their own space. The doors came from Loews and are not heavy-duty. After all, we have rescue cats, not rescue tigers, like our friend Jill at the big cat sanctuary.

Door number one was taken off and moved into the garage to be spray painted. We did not want the cats to get high or sickened by the paint fumes. In addition, a better paint job would result if the door was flat on the garage floor.

I must note that my husband is a wizard with a can of spray paint. He learned from an expert, his dad, an auto body man who made his living painting cars. Once the job was done, our perfectly painted white door was left on the garage floor to dry completely.

The next day I went to the store for groceries. I drove home thinking about what I would make for dinner and, as always, drove the car into the garage. I was almost all the way in when the lightning bolt hit me … “YOU HAVE JUST RUN OVER THE DOOR!”. My heart sunk as I slowly backed up the car and got out to inspect the inevitable carnage I had made.

All I can report is that in some rare instances in life, miracles do occur. Somehow, our inexpensive bifold was completely unharmed, every slat in place, not a pile of splintered wood. The only harm was the tire tracks on the snowy white paint job.

I went upstairs to tell my husband that I had run over his beautifully painted door. He laughed…and got out a can of spray paint to cover up my tracks.

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In college, I chose botany over zoology figuring I would find more joy in dissecting plants than dead animals. This fortuitous decision gave me more than three credits. It gave me a life-long love of botany. Summer has just arrived, and what better time for a refresher course in Botany 101… minus the exams.

For starters, 90% of all the plants on earth now are angiosperms or flowering plants that have seeds enclosed in fruit. This phylum contains approximately 300,000 species which are grouped into 416 families. However, over one-fourth of all the flowering plants are in the top three families.

Ask a small child to draw a flower, and the flower will almost always be in the aster family, Asteraceae, the largest plant family with 24,000 species. It’s the classic flower design, a round center with petals radiating around. Our gardens overflow with this family: asters, sunflowers, daisies, dahlias, chrysanthemums, marigolds, zinnias, cosmos and dandelions. But we can also eat some of the family members, lettuce and artichokes.

The orchid family, Orchidaceae, is the second largest plant family with over 20,000 species. Most orchids like it hot, growing in the tropics. And the majority of orchids are epiphytes or “air plants”. They attach themselves to trees in the rainforest to get more light. Needing no soil, the roots dangle in the air taking in the moist air and rain. Around 200 species of orchids are native to the United States, of which 50% call Florida home.

If you like pea soup or bean burritos, thank the third largest plant family, Fabaceae, the pea and legume family with 18,000 species. Members include peas, all sorts of beans, clover and alfalfa. Peanuts are family members, too, and they form in an unusual way. “Flowers develop near the ground. After the flowers have self-pollinated, its developing fruits force themselves under the ground first vertically, then horizontically. Its fruits then continue developing underground until they mature.”

Humans would not survive without the fourth largest plant family, the grass family, Poaceae. Its 12,000 species include the major worldwide food sources, wheat, corn, rice, oats, rye and sorghum. Bamboo is also a grass. Ponder this: A person can sit in a bamboo house on a bamboo chair at a bamboo table and eat bamboo shoots off a bamboo plate. And this story could go on and on.

And last, I’ll end on a note of sweetness. Rosaceae, the rose family, has over 2,500 species. How can a summer day get better than this…smell the roses while eating a ripe peach? Or perhaps you would prefer a plum, pear, apricot, apple, strawberry, raspberry, cherry, blackberry or almond. The rose family is the taste of summer.

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