Andrea Masciari

Voting in America humbles me a bit, even now, so many years after my eighteenth birthday.  While I stand in the voting booth and fill in the check boxes of my chosen candidates and referendum issues, I understand how profound and critical this process is to the protection and continuation of our democracy and indeed, to the progress (or the detriment) of the entire world.  I am not one of those Americans who believe we are number one in everything we do and in every utterance we speak or write.  Nor do I support every decision our government makes on our behalf, in the name of our constitution, of those founding fathers who, we sometimes forget, did not always have the best of intentions for the sake of the common good.  Greed is greed, then and now, and as we recognize our leaders’ shortcomings, great and small, we realize that our place in the world, our standing in the eyes of those so much less fortunate than us, no longer looms larger than life itself.  And I cringe at the realization of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney leading the charge entrusted to them.  But I digress.

Life is full of humor and comedic antics, and like most humans, finding that humor in our daily lives brings great respite from an otherwise stressful existence.  My friends, Svetlana and Miroslav, have allowed me to find such relief, at their expense, in the voting process of these divisively united states.  As newly confirmed American citizens, they take great pride in this privilege of deciding who will lead us and which laws will guide our lives.  Yet, after all the seriousness of their induction ceremony that I proudly witnessed at Faneuil Hall in 2003, their first election encompassed our very own dog kennel noise issue.  After decades of Tito’s rule, then years of bombs and chaos and all the things that war eliminates from ordinary life - necessities like stability, electricity, food and joy -my friends mustered up the courage to immigrate to a faraway, unknown land.  This land promised them a chance at the dreams and the very first ballot they cast was meant to eliminate or perpetuate a bunch of noisy dogs.  As a true American who respects the secrecy of that booth, I never asked them how they voted.  But knowing them as well as I do, I have an idea of what their decisions were on that rainy April day.

In former Yugoslavia, where Communism and then radical Islam affected their daily lives for many years, they embarked upon a journey to the United States of America where their opinions would be heard, their dreams fulfilled, and their sense of wanderlust profoundly impacted by the autonomy allowed by our free society.  Svetlana and Miroslav could now impose their democratic views in the voting booth, thereby relinquishing the repression of a communist upbringing.  And this is what America is all about, is it not?  This is what it means to be created equal and to enjoy the fruits of one’s own labor.  An American voting booth – that coveted place of a free and democratic society – so often devoid of the majority of people eligible to make their voices heard.

I held my breath all spring while the apple tree replaced its flowers with tiny golden delicious apples and the apricots began to plump up enough to ripen to their glorious amber red.  The squirrels continuously stood guard, waiting for the right moment to pounce upon our apples and apricots and peaches and plums, harvesting the premature budding crop for their insatiable appetites for homegrown fruit.  These fuzzy, gray misers live in nearby trees and under the eaves of a neighboring house, with all the comforts of hearth and home beckoning to them from our tiny backyard garden.  After several years of losing battles between rodent and human, my crazed husband chased a squirrel out of the peach tree.  The squirrel ran for his life, across the fence, onto a tree and finally, his tiny heart pounding, crouched on top of our handmade birdhouse.  He stared down at the builder of the birdhouse and gnawed profusely on his unripened treasure, chanting, I’m certain of it, “You can’t catch me.  You can’t catch me.” With blood pressure high and head hanging low, a disgusted man, not usually small in stature, threw his hands in the air and gave up.

So I found a recipe on the Web for a cayenne pepper concoction that was supposed to saturate the little buggers’ paws and burn their mouths when they ate the coveted fruit.  Nothing fatal or permanently injurious – just a little zing, a punishment, if you will, for stealing something that belongs to me.  The first rain, and the second and third, proved to render the maintenance of such a deterrent too much for me to sustain.  As the torrential downpours washed the pepper goo into the ground, the squirrels happily pranced around our backyard with the nectar of the gods dripping from their freeloading, parasitic little faces.

Last year we tried bird netting.  Mind you, we don’t have a problem with birds.  In fact, we’d be willing to share some of our fruit with sparrows and bluejays and cardinals.  The gnaw-proof black netting was intended to keep the squirrels at bay, virtually impossible for them to find their way to the bursting fruit.  It seemed to be working for a while, but I noticed the fruit’s stunted growth and small black spots on the apricots’ delicate skins.  But we kept that netting bound tight, checking each day for gaps in the netting’s closures and rejoined them together.  Tons of ugly string ties feathered the net and tree.  Finally, we beat those rogues at this game, or so we thought.  They’d have to find something else to eat, like, say, acorns.  Then one beautiful summer morning I found a squirrel cheerily munching on a black and green apricot.  With only six pieces of fruit left on the tree, I tore down the net and walked to the supermarket for a pound of California apricots for two dollars and ninety-nine cents.

After several futile attempts at various kinds of deterrents, we had just about given up.  “Not so fast,” asserted the repellent specialist at a nearby nursery, assuring us that fox urine would do the trick.  After all, the fox is a squirrel’s natural enemy, its predator, and its evil foe.  Well, even after my husband voiced his doubts because our squirrels are “city squirrels and they don’t know they’re supposed to be afraid of foxes,” we set up a series of five or six plastic bottles of the putrid stuff.  Lo and behold, a lone squirrel, a scout of sorts, probably looking to see if we were serious about this or just humoring him and his cohorts, jumped right over one of the vials hanging on the fence.   He then jumped into the apple tree, over the squirrel-eaten blueberry bush and into the apricot tree.  This isn’t funny anymore.  Perhaps it will be one day as we sip on a cool glass of Chardonnay from a cabin in the remote wilderness of Alaska.  I can deal with moose.  At least moose offer strange magical beauty and an imposing dose of otherworldliness.  They slowly, yet gently, crush everything in their path, but they don’t, as far as I know, climb apricot trees.