A couple of years ago, it was rats, who came from below. They moved into the crawl space beneath my house, and my neighbor’s, and working together, we got the situation mostly under control. We can only take some of the credit, though – another house on the street was sold, and though the former owner neglected to take the rodent occupants of their home with them,  the new owners took immediate action to evict them. It was, apparently, a large and expensive undertaking.

The new owners are very popular on our little street.

This year began with a mole, who also came from below, creating a string of volcanoes across my lawn while I tried to find an effective way to remove it – since my lawn is located in one of two states where traps are illegal, in spite of the fact that they can be readily purchased pretty much anywhere. Eventually I found a company who set a trap, and that was the end of my mole woes.

Not long after, I began to hear buzzing in my office, which I didn’t really think much about until I took a short trip to Salt Lake City, where the power of subliminal suggestion left me mildly obsessed with bees, or at least, their hives. In case you are wondering why, here are some of my vacation pictures:

A finial at Brigham Young’s House.

 The door to the Temple.

I don’t even remember what the Eagle on the Beehive was all about, I just had to walk under it to get across the street to see Brigham Young’s house, which is called Beehive House and, not coincidentally, is that beehive-shaped roof you see in the photo. I had a dessert called Beehive Cake in a nearby restaurant after my tour.

I think you see my point, but please let me know if you need further illustration. I took quite a few photos on this trip.

In any case, I have nothing against bees, who are welcome in my garden any time, nor against beehives, which are the source of delicious honey, so I was relatively unconcerned with the whole thing until I realized that although I could hear bees quite loudly in my office, I could not locate a beehive on the outside of my house. That’s when I had my a-ha moment, where I remembered, clear as day, an electrician working in the crawl space next to my office saying to me, on finishing his work, you know you have a couple of bees in there, right?

I google things like, Beehive in Wall, and I learn helpful facts, such as if you have honeybees in your wall, your biggest potential problem isn’t bee stings, it’s the rodents that will be attracted by the honey. I call my father, who helpfully suggests I don’t try to remove the hive myself. Then I call every bee removal service I can locate in my area, and choose the one not with the best reviews or price, but the first available appointment.

The Bee Guy examines my walls with some sort of gadget, then looks at the outside of the house, and tells me I don’t have bees at all: I have wasps – mud daubers, to be precise. They’re beneficial, he says. They eat insects, and won’t sting me, or damage my house, and I should just leave them alone. The whole consultation, such as it is, takes ten minutes and costs $85.

I get used to the noise and resign myself to having bees – beneficial mud daubers, anyway – in my walls. It doesn’t seem to be a problem, since I’ve been assured they won’t come through, and I only hear them in my office and only at certain times of the day. The Child resumes sleeping again, and eventually, resumes sleeping in her room, which is across the hall from my office and thus was considered unsafe and unfit for habitation. When she resumes sleeping, I do, too.

Until this weekend, when I was jolted from a sound sleep to The Child screaming in terror, Mommy, come quickly, the cat is on the roof! the cat is on the roof!

It’s dark, and I stumble into her room, where the Red Dog is dancing joyfully. The cat is on the roof!

Even through the darkness and my mental fog, I can see two things: there is definitely a cat on the roof outside The Child’s window, and also, it did not get there from The Child’s room, whose windows, like all the windows in the house, are screened. Perplexed, I wander back to my bedroom in search of my glasses, since being able to see would dramatically help my ability to cope with this problem. On my way back, I pass two perplexed cats in the hallway.

It’s not our cat, I tell The Child. She’s right there.

We go back to her window, where the small dark shadow has now moved higher, up the garage roof, and though it isn’t our cat, it is most definitely a cat. It won’t stop yowling.

I take the screen off the window and call gently to it, and it comes quickly to me. It looks remarkably like our little Tuxedo cat, except with fluffier fur, and no identifying tag. It’s 4am. I tell The Child, let her sleep in here tonight, and I’ll figure this out tomorrow.

I go back to bed, where my bee-tuning-out skills come in handy – I can hear the Roof Cat’s meowing in the other room, but it has no effect on me. I don’t hear anything, in fact, until The Child starts banging on the wall in the early morning, pleading for me to bring her aspirin – the cat noise kept her awake all night and she now has a crushing headache. I give her the aspirin, then take the cat downstairs to drink my coffee and, hopefully, figure out what to do with it.

Roof Cat paces furiously around the living room, looking for exit points, howling loudly as it searches , and hissing when it sees the Red Dog. I try to drink my coffee, but the Red Dog is so perturbed that he knocks my hand, and I am instantly scalded and saturated. The cat is friendly enough, but clearly, noisily desperate to leave. She’s not even interested in the food I offer, and watching her, it occurs to me that one reason a cat would be so anxious to leave is if she had a litter of kittens hidden away somewhere. I load the cat into our carrier, and drive to the 24-hour animal hospital to the sounds of her extremely vocal protests.

They listen patiently as I explain about the cat on the roof and trying to escape and maybe there are kittens somewhere and does it have a microchip and if not is there any chance this cat will end up being put to sleep at Animal Control? They take the cat away, and return moments later with some reassurance: Roof Cat has a microchip, and, being a he, likely isn’t caring for kittens.

A few hours later, the owner calls me to say, thanks. He hates being indoors, and keeps ending up on people’s roofs.

No worries, I say. It was only a matter of time before he ended up on mine.

In the end, replacing the car proves fairly simple: I research cars on the Consumer Reports website, and when I find a model I like, I submit a request through Costco’s auto buying program. They refer me to dealers that aren’t that close by, but a look at the Yelp reviews usually tells me why.

Mr. Faraway comes for the weekend, and doesn’t complain about having to sit in the back seat while I test drive cars, and casually mentions he’s a prosecutor to the various salespeople, just in case.

If nothing else, I find it reassuring, and settle on a car very quickly: the exact same model of Subaru I had before I met The Departed. The trusty, reliable car that he never had a nice thing to say about; the car that as its last service to me, helped to pay the bill to liberate me.

This time, though, I got the heated seats and hands-free cell phone thingamabob, figuring  it made more sense to pay for it up front than pay for not having it over time, with traffic tickets.

After the repairs to the Mini and buying my way out of the Mini and into the Subaru, my vacation budget is gone. The hoped-for Alaska cruise will not happen this year, I tell The Child, but she’s okay with that when I suggest another plan, to go visit the Grand Canyon.

All her friends have been there, and she hasn’t, so she this is something she needs to do. All my husbands have been there, too, but I haven’t.

Perhaps this year, it’s time.

The problems I had during Snowpocalyse reminded me how much I missed my trusty old Subaru. It had its share of dings and hadn’t been fancy to begin with, but it got the job done.

I drive to my eye doctor one day, and there’s construction in the area, which means there’s a detour: if you’re not paying attention, you might not realize until the last second that you can’t go straight and you might suddenly swerve in front of another car and only then realize that you’ve got a red light too and then brake suddenly, at an angle.

This is what the lady in front of me does, and the nice thing about Minis is that they can stop pretty quickly – there’s not much car to stop, after all. But something doesn’t feel right – I remember how my old car’s antilock brakes used to feel, and the Mini has antilock brakes, and this felt … different. Still, it stopped fine and I thanked my lucky stars and considered it a warning to go in and get that airbag light fixed permanently, stopping by my mechanic on the way home and scheduling the work for a few days later. I forget to mention that there’s a funny sound coming from the back of my car now – it only happens sometimes, when I brake. Easy to forget.

The light has been on for so long that when it’s fixed,  I find it a bit unnerving, but I start to get used to it and feel a bit more normal driving – a bit less alert, though this may have something to do with the fact that I’m exhausted and being pulled in a million directions: I have a large event planned for that Saturday, which involves me speaking publicly, and a rescue dog that I’ve agreed to foster and need to pick up the following Monday. On Friday evening, I’m driving back from The Child’s sleepover where I delivered the sleeping bag she forgot, on my way to the store to get the last few things I need for the event, that I forgot, and my phone rings about the rescue dog I’m supposed to pick up on Monday so I answer it even though I’m driving, because cell phone use is only only a secondary offense in Washington – you can’t get pulled over for it unless you also happen to be speeding or something, which I’m not.

Or at least, that’s what I thought, right until the police car pulled me over. The officer was nice about it and not even seem upset that I couldn’t find my registration – which I knew was there, I distinctly remember putting it there after the last time I got pulled over. She heads back to her car saying, just hold it out the window if you find it but I’m not worried about it. I shift the car into park.

Or at least, that’s what I thought, right until the moment my car stopped with a jolt, and I discovered I had actually shifted into reverse. I had backed into the police car, and even better, I had done so in such a way that we could not get our bumpers apart.

We have time to figure it out, though. Since she was involved in the accident, she can’t write it up, and we have to wait for another officer to arrive. You would think it would take only a few minutes, what with being  around the corner from the police station, but – presumably because there’s no danger whatsoever that I will flee, or perhaps because if I did flee I wouldn’t be too hard to catch, towing a police car with a Mini – it takes a half hour for the other officer to arrive. This officer is mercifully able to figure out how to get the two bumpers apart, and there’s no damage to the police car, and what appears to be only minimal damage to the Mini, which isn’t even noticeable when a piece of plastic trim is clicked back into place.

The big event goes off without a hitch on Saturday, but as I drive home, I realize that sound is still there: the one from the back of my car.  I call the mechanic to describe it, and he sounds alarmed. Bring it back in, he says. It’s Monday, and he has an opening on Thursday.

Great, I say. So it’s safe to drive then? The foster dog is an hour’s drive, and I’ve promised to get her that evening.

No, he says. You know what? Bring it in tomorrow.

I cancel the dog pickup, and bring the car in as instructed, only to learn that the brake calipers have seized. The only thing I understand about that statement is this – it will cost $800+ to fix and, no, the car isn’t safe to drive without it.

The mechanic is scratching his head – this car does not have that many miles on it, he says. This should not have happened.

In the past, I have told him my plan for this car: drive it a few years and turn then hand it down to The Child. The mechanic always joked with me, Why? Don’t you love her?

The repairs have have pretty much eaten up the money I’d hoped to use for vacation, but I hold on to hope we might still be able to take our planned summer trip to Alaska, and I don’t let go of it until the next morning, when we start to head out of the house and the garage door stops opening just an inch too low to get a Mini out.

I can take a hint, especially when the universe delivers it with sledgehammer subtlety: Underwater or not, it’s time to replace the car.