The Diabolical Otter

It is almost beyond belief that my family can provide such interesting fodder for a blog - and really, I am not convinced that the high jinx of the Lemony Lemonades is really all that interesting or inspiring but this is like my own little Prozac or my cheap and cheerful alternative to pricey therapy. That being said, I was reminded this evening while supping with my parents, Baby Girl and Mr. Lemony Lemonade about one of my most favourite summertime dilemmas - the Diabolical Otter.

It all officially began for the Summer of '07 when I made the mistake of asking my parents, recently returned from "up North" if they had seen hide or hair of the Diabolical Otter. I should explain, said Diabolical Otter entered the scene last summer after my parents had invested my inheritance in building a boathouse at their cottage. At the conclusion of said construction, which, by the by, rivalled the Taj Mahal in its importance, dedication of parental man hours and general angst, the Diabolical Otter appeared.

The Diabolical Otter at a moment's notice and the minute that the cottage was vacated, would hop or leap or whatever an amphibious rodent is want to do, and would take a huge poop on the dock of the boathouse. Once, we left the boathouse only to realize that we had forgotten some important and no doubt essential piece of equipment and quickly returned to the boathouse only to find that in the intervening minutes, the Diabolical Otter had done his diabolical business right on the dock. The combination of the stealth and the stinkiness culminated in the Otter being dubbed by me as "the Diabolical Otter." Only the most diabolical creature could be so MEAN as to desecrate the boathouse. I mean, didn't the bloody thing know that it was simply ruining our peaceful enjoyment of nature and the outdoors. How, in God's name, was I supposed to commune with the natural world with the stink of Otter poop ruining it all for me? Of course, my father felt that the Diabolical Otter was an afront to all that was good and right with the world and did not appreciate it when I helpfully pointed out that the Diabolical Otter was likely taking some sort of lefty-liberal-tree hugging-pro-environment stand and protesting the fact that we had inadvertently built the Taj Mahal directly over its home, mating ground, Otter public space or sacred Otter burial site. It was a stand of poopy proportions, a sort of Otter f-you.

Of course, the pooping Diabolical Otter is now safely ensconced in the Lemony Lemonade vernacular, right alongside things like the genius of John Denver. However, the Diabolical Otter is not important because of the stinky poops but because he started the ongoing Lemony Lemonade dialogue as to how to deal with the Diabolical Otter, because you see, the Lemony Lemonades are what I call "big picture people." Silly little details like actually solving a problem would be far too "micro" for us, we hire people to solve problems, but we are giants of the commentary, the complaint and the personal soapbox. Therefore, we are engaged in debate from now and on into infinity about the motivation of the poopy Diabolical Otter - was he or she hugged enough as a child, was this a failing of the Otter community as a whole that they had managed to create such a scallywag and by God, wasn't there a governmental agency that was responsible for dealing with this sort of thing? Didn't we pay our taxes in order to be protected from vexing, small rodents and their poop!

In a stroke of what I can only call sheer genius, my mother was the first and to date, the only one to posit a possible solution. She determined that without a doubt, the best and only solution was to smear bear scent on the boathouse. This suggestion silenced the Lemony Lemonades for about one nano-second as all our little pea brains spun furiously attempting to come up with a retort, a put down or witty remark. Let's just say that while we all chortled and generally rolled our eyes to indicate just how very crazy smearing bear scent on the boathouse was, what we were all really thinking was "curses, why didn't I think of that." My mistake was to suggest that perhaps smearing bear scent was perhaps going to create an even large problem. For example, what were we going to do with thirty horny bears on our dock? or, what if the bears showed up and I had gotten some bear scent on me and I was carted off and held as their captive? or, far more likely, what if a bunch of drunk adolescent bears decided to "hang" at our place, smoke pot and listen to rock and roll music at uncivilised and anti-social hours? Thank God one of us was thinking straight!

You will be happy to hear that this isn't the end of the tale because tonight at dinner we were updated. As it turns out, a box that formerly housed a television had somehow fallen onto the dock over the winter and this past weekend my father discovered that the Diabolical Otter, in a show of gallantry and impeccable manners, had decided to use said box as his own Otter Port-a-Potty. My father determined, therefore, that the box was to become a permanent fixture at the boathouse, as it is far easier to clean up the oily, slick, otter poop from the box rather than the dock itself; we are to think of it like an Otter kitty litter box.

Just when I thought that my head might actually explode, my mother piped up with possibly her most inspired thought to date - she had in fact thought of another SOLUTION. All we needed to do was smear the boathouse in otter blood because, she stated, as if she actually knew, that an animal will not venture to a place where another member of their species had died. But of course, she continued, it would be difficult to locate sufficient quantities of otter blood to really do the trick.

So, my Diabolical Otter friend, I am certainly glad that my mother is on my side of this equation because I am not quite sure if she is a genius or a budding serial killer, either way, I say to you Diabolical Otter you have been a worthy adversary but you are no match for the Lemony Lemonades.