“You have a serious rat problem.”

That wasn’t what I was hoping to hear from the car mechanic today after he put on my new tires.

He then proceeded to show me a nest that covered about half my engine compartment made of fuzz from the car’s chewed up hood liner, mesquite beans, and various things from our compost pile. I recognized the pomegranate skins and lime peels as my stomach turned.

“Gross.”

“Would you like me to clean it out?”

“Yes, please.”

We do have a rat problem. It’s just part of where we live. Everyone experiences it, and many of our neighbors have had serious engine damage from rats chewing up wiring. They’ve sometimes caused havoc in our garden as well.

To clarify, the rats that live here are not “city rats.” They are pack rats and wood rats, and were it not for the damage they do, you might think they are cute. They look sort of like kitten-sized brown mice.

We’ve live trapped a hundred or more of them, but that seems futile. People we know have tried various things to repel them, including spraying chili sauce around their engine compartments and keeping their car hoods open whenever parked. (The rats apparently like closed in spaces.) None of it really seems to work.

Today, the mechanic suggested something he guaranteed would work — plastic bottles with holes drilled in them, filled with dryer sheets and fabric softener, and then wired into the engine compartment.

“You have to keep them wet though,” he said. “Animals hate the smell of this stuff.”

He claimed that moth balls would also work but that they made your car smell awful.

So my afternoon was spent rigging up these little bottles and wiring them into the car. We’ll see if it works.

There is one animal here that I had never seen and really wanted to — the gila monster. Yesterday, we saw one right in front of our house. It ran right across the porch and kept on running. It was a juvenile and ran so fast that I didn’t get the greatest pictures. We were so excited!

I just got off the phone with our 83-year-old neighbor, who has been for some time back home in Wisconsin. We talk on the phone regularly, and it’s always a pleasure to hear from him. He is one of the sharpest, most thoughtful people I know, and I am lucky to count him as a good friend.

Back when we first came here, if you’d had told me that I’d be such good friends with this person, I wouldn’t have believed it. But that’s been one of the surprises of living in a small rural community.

While there are things about living here that drive me crazy (it’s almost impossible to have privacy…I’ve heard stories about myself repeated back through the grapevine until they are nearly unrecognizable, and as one distant friend said recently “our public lives intersect with our social and economic ones in ways that in cities you can have different spheres. There are not many ‘anonymous days’ in rural communities.”), there are other things that are delightful.

One of them is the riches I have found in unexpected people like our neighbor. It makes me think that I might make more of an effort to connect with diverse* people if I ever lived in a city again.

* While I often lament the lack of “diversity” here, I am coming to understand that diversity can mean different things. While we sadly lack racial or ethnic diversity, we do have a collection of folks that span a crazy spectrum of political ideologies, backgrounds, and ages.