Bit Stream

An update about my public war with squirrels: a new squatter has taken up residence in the dormer roofs of the third story. Our attic rafters are infested. I know this not because I heard a rodent behind the walls, which I have since, nor because I have seen critters on the roof, which I had before. I know this because of the many bits of news that I find on the snow.

Most of the roof of our house was last insulated sometime during World War II, when it was common practice to use newsprint for that purpose. The pages were piled together and bound into heavier paper sleeves, courtesy of Montgomery Wards (I found a label on one of the bags that I replaced last summer with the itchy pink stuff). I have no idea whether this practice was a result of wartime frugality, post-depression frugality, or simply because newspaper was cheap and effective insulation--good old frugal common sense. Last summer, removing old insulation gingerly, I was able to pause and read unabashedly xenophobic headlines: Japs and Krauts in full 48-point grandeur. But when the squirrels tunnel news from the house, the yard is adrift in snippets: truncated coupons, rent classifieds, stranded midsentences of forgotten legends of the funnies.

The third-story dormers are equipped with aluminum soffits and fascia, ineptly installed by the low-buck primates contracted when the city rehabbed the house ten years ago. Once I replace them, the most ingenious squirrel will be thwarted, I'll boast. But I'm in no hurry to hoist the ladders atop snow, ice, and frozen ground. A likely immediate solution: the draconian removal of the mulberry tree that provides an easy street to the roof. I've trimmed it repeatedly, but the thing grows fast and lives to grope clapboard. And allowing the rodents up there in the first place fosters a temptation they are not bred to resist. A tough call, really, because it's a reasonably handsome tree that screens much of our backyard from the neighbors. That's reason enough, I suppose, to consult the garden catalogs for a hardy and swift-growing evergreen replacement.