The Miracle and Misery of Nature

Last year when I was out shopping I saw this beautiful peony bush with a lovely fuchsia-colored flower and scooped it up and planted it on the side of my house near the front porch. It bloomed like crazy and I really enjoyed it.

But this past winter was brutal and we had several feet of snow on our roof and huge ice dams that caused damage inside of our home and the also to the outside. One huge ice dam came crashing down on the peony bush and it was leveled to just a few short branches. I feared the worst because we had to cut it right down to the ground because it sustained so much damage. I told my husband that I would probably go out and buy another one. My grandmother always had them in her yard in Quincy, Massachusetts, where I was brought up, and I thought it would be a nice tribute to her to grow the flowers, which have an incredible smell!

Well just about a month ago, I noticed green shoots sprouting up from the earth and as the weeks went by, they grew taller and taller and then some buds appeared and out came the most beautiful peonies. I don't know how they managed to survive; I guess that's mother nature for you.

Speaking about mother nature, we recently went to put on our central air conditioning unit and it came on then it shorted out. We tried it again and only the fan on the unit ran and did not give out any cold air. We called in Tommy our air-conditioning consultant and when he opened up the unit there were three or four mice living in there under a huge nest they had built over the winter. They had also brought in hundreds of acorns and black walnuts that had dropped from our trees and probably lived on them throughout the cold and snowy winter we had. We've been here eight years and never had a mouse problem before. After Tommy had ousted the mouse family, he discovered that they had eaten the plastic on the electrical wires inside the unit and had bitten straight through the wires, so all that had to be replaced.

Since this happened I have heard numerous stories from people who have had problems with mice; one said they eaten the wires inside her car and it cost over $1,200 to fix. Another said they had chewed the wires in his tractor that was parked inside a barn for the winter. For such small creatures, they sure do a lot of damage.