My Personal Hero

It’s invisible.

As in so well hidden in plain sight, it could easily be the site of an undercover organization (facebook, keep reading before you ban me). It’s so hidden in plain site, in fact, it’s on one of the only roads in town (there’s like 2), it’s easily visible from the road and there are no houses in site next to it. Yet, no one can seem to find it. I mean, sure it’s a white house in the snow and I can see where that might make things difficult, but this is the age of sci/fi level technology. A satellite millions of miles away in the universe can pin point a location with the precision of an arrow hitting the center of a target. (please excuse any scientific inaccuracies in that sentence, sometimes I make things up GASP!)

And yet, almost everyone who has tried to come to our house and is not local has gotten lost. The washer and dryer guys. The electricians. The internet guy. The pest guy. They all have called us with the same message “I’m at (fill in the blank) and am having trouble finding your house. Can you direct me?” To which we say “we just moved here and have no idea where (fill in the blank) is. Let me guess, you are using google maps?”

You see, somewhere, sometime, something changed. A road was renamed or something. I have no idea. But google maps sends people to an entirely different town. Apple has it figured out but apparently everyone in Vermont is an… android user (I know, I’m trying to not let this knowledge effect my Vermont happy bubble.) And so, everyone gets lost and it’s really fun navigating them away from (fill in the blank) when we have no idea where anything is. It sounds a little like “go over the big bridge and through the tunnel. but not the tunnel to the right, go to the one on the left. And if you see the other bridge, you went too far. Unless you are coming from the other direction in which case you’re good.” See, we are totally figuring out Vermont.

Speaking of pest guy. I have met my own personal wilderness hero. Like if I ever get stuck out in the woods, and find myself wandering into the mating grounds of a large moose, this is who I want to be with me.

Did you know that flies hibernate in ceilings and walls? And when they emerge, they appear to be dead. Until to try to dispose of them, in which they suddenly resurrect themselves like zombie flies? I’ve only seen this phenomenon once before and it’s just as unsettling a second time. But the past month it has been happening and has not been letting up. Which is apparently common in Vermont. And according to the pest person, has to be dealt with in the fall before they hibernate.

So anyway, first it was the flies. Then came the lady bugs. hundreds of them everywhere in little lady bug clusters. Only apparently they aren’t actually ladybugs but some other ladybug lookalike. But after the ladybugs came the daddy long legs. We’ve killed at least 10 of them. So along with the mice (we’ve had 2 found dead now but the second wasn’t nearly as dramatic a removal), we figured we’d get someone out here before the plague of locusts graced our presence. And that’s how we met HER.

Because it turns out, our pest guy isn’t a guy at all. It’s a woman. Which already makes her amazeballs in my eyes. Because, although I am a firm believer that women are capable of doing any job, I still expect a pest person to be a guy. Simply because statistically, most tend to be male. So when I realized it was a woman, I was already in the mindset of “you go girl!” in feminine solidarity.

But it turns out not only is she a pest person, she is a super badass pest person. Our pest guys in Utah just came, sprayed a few things, and left. Even on the first visit. If anything came up, they would give us something to deal with it and said good luck! but that was about it.

This woman inspected every nook and cranny of my house. She knew her stuff left and right. She went up in our attic, she dug through the dirt, she crawled UNDER OR HOUSE, she even gave us pointers on the quality of our house beams. And she did it all without even considering that death might be awaiting her in the areas she was crawling into. If you saw her, she’d be your hero too.

And not only that, she gave us live mouse traps of epic mouse catching quality. She will be visiting our house every month for the next several months and spend 40 minutes hunting down every hole, nook, nest, and inhabitant and repair and deal with it all for us until it’s all done. She will even check chicken coops for holes and problem areas predators might get into. She’s doing everything possible to make us feel safe short of tucking us in at night with a glass of warm milk.

I’d would totally ask her to move in permanently as a live-in grounds keeper if we were “live-in groundskeeper” kind of people.