November 26, 2001
  moles

I'm back.

(Miss me?)

We were walking to lunch today, mother and daughter, and I commented to her what a bizarre neighborhood we live in. It's still we, even though I haven't lived a year in my mother's house since the age of seventeen. It's been over a decade, and I still come back to that old neighborhood with that satisfaction of coming home. I can even notice the small changes that inevitably take place, and feel enough proprietary claim to the block that I can be indignant about them.

As I say, it's a weird neighborhood, because it screams "White Trash!" without ever, you know, actually containing any. Okay, so maybe the people living in the house with the pink flamingo lawn ornaments are white trash, I wouldn't know. But the rest of them, the normal, everyday neighbors that my mother has lived near for the last twenty-five years, they're all significant Non White Trashers.

Okay, except for maybe that one house that has painted itself flourescent pink.

And the one family that remodeled their single floor detached house to look like, well, a mobile home.

With the exception of those three families, everybody there is white collar, and I swear there isn't a single gun in the entire neighborhood. There are expensive boats in the driveways, and the odd Porsche, and while it is true that a lot of the people working in the yards are wearing red plaid flannel, I would like to point out that red plaid flannel is only to be expected when one lives in Seattle and it rains a lot. Nobody in that neighborhood is from Kent -- something that only those of you who've lived in the Seattle area would appreciate -- and that, in and of itself, just goes to show the absence of White Trashness from the neighborhood.

To be from Seattle is to be on a state of constant alert against the appellation of White Trash. Never mind the fact that I'm Japanese. There are only four options for a person from the Seattle area: White Trash is the least acceptable. Better to be a Java-head, a Granola, or ATF-bait.

There is a point to this whole story, and now that I'm reminded of that, I'll get back to it. As I was saying, my mother and I were walking up the street having a conversation about the neighborhood, when my mother stopped suddenly and pointed to one of the houses. "Oh, poor people," she said in her Japenglish, translated here for the benefit of those who aren't fluent in same.

A neat line of dirt piles, each about the size of a human head, marched in evenly spaced intervals across the perfectly manicured lawn.

Mole holes.

Not being a homeowner or gardener myself, I have no problem with moles. Moles are funny. They're small, and they're blind, and they're soft, and every so often one shows up dead in the backyard, which provides hours of entertainment for one and one's sister if one is bored enough. One can dress the dead mole in doll clothes and give them tea, or just pat them for long periods of time, or hold funeral services and then dig them up again to hold new funeral services, or go door to door and investigate The Death of the Mole by interrogating the cats of neighbors.

Moles aren't what you would call one of the great threats of the age. They're pretty simple little creatures, and require very little to keep them satisfied. They dig. That's pretty much all they do. Of course, all that digging they do creates a lot of dirt, which has to be removed from under the earth to above the earth. As a result, they periodically eject deliberately measured piles of detritus in scientifically calibrated distances that obviously have some relationship with the phase of the moon. It is pretty much possible to predict exactly where the next mole pile will show up using the location of the first two and a ruler.

My mother, who is a homeowner and gardener and yes, a mother, who doesn't quite get the charm of having a dead mole show up in the guest chair at family dinners, has -- for her -- uncharacteristic emotions regarding moles.

"Did I ever tell you, a few years ago I had a relationship with a mole," she told me as we walked.

"A war?" I guessed.

She shook her head dubiously. My mother isn't big into the whole conflict thing. "He kept digging up holes in my lawn, and everywhere, there were little piles of dirt. I became so mad. One day I woke up and there were so many piles of dirt on the front yard. I took the hose and I put it into one of the holes and I turned it on."

She nodded her head firmly, reliving the victory.

"You drowned the mole?" I asked, reproachfully. We're big on animal rights, in my family.

An expression of faint regret crossed her face. "I don't think so, but I put so much water into the hole. Like the size of the entire house. And I said, 'There, you see what happens when you do that to my lawn?' Except that night, I was walking to the restaurant for dinner and there was an earthquake."

"An earthquake," I echoed, blankly. Segue, anyone?

"Earthquake," she repeated. "I thought, mole, dirt, earth, underground, earthquake. Maybe the mole was angry at me. Uh oh."

We passed another yard covered in little mole hills, and again that expression of regret appeared. "Now I'm scared to hose the mole, because what if next time it is a bigger earthquake?"