Skunk Warfare

I’ve just finished doing nothing in my shop as I stand here on my back door step and hurl a flat rock to the South, where on a good day with a strong North wind, it leaves the city of Princeton and lands just over into the county. This evening’s breeze has just delivered the pungent greeting card of an old familiar acquaintance.
A month earlier I had made myself a small campfire near my workshop and was standing, admiring my outdoorsmanship at having a fire without smoke. It was dark, but not so dark that I couldn’t see the black and white visitor creeping up from behind my shop. We saw each other at about the same time, so as he broke left behind my fire, I went right to the porch of my shop. I looked back to see him standing where I had been, mesmerized in the light of my fire. He waited for a minute then disappeared under my lawnmower shed.
This had not been my only close encounter of the worst kind. We had met before on a different evening where he had also retreated underneath the shed. This, to me, established his residency, which was total unacceptable, so to quote Daffy Duck, “Of course, you know, this means war”.
I deployed the latest chemical warfare around the shed designed to voluntarily repel “Pepe Le Pew” but was disappointed to see one night that he had brought home a date. This escalated the situation beyond the realm of negotiation as I seeded the area with moth balls thinking that skunks would eat them, get sick and go away. After a few days, it was clear that sanctions were not going to get results.
I toyed with the idea of using my shop vac to inject smoke under the shed from some smoldering sawdust. In this daylight raid, I would need to plug the holes under the shed after they were smoked out. This close proximity wreaked with the possibility of a counter attack by the skunks, so the mission was scrubbed.
I’ve decided to surround the enemy in their headquarters, sealing up the gaps between building and ground, leaving a single exit hole through a small wooden box having a one-way flapper door. This way they will be locked out during the night when they go out on the town.
This is the plan anyway, lined up behind checking the rain gauge, filling the bird feeder and my favorite, semi-snoozing in the porch rocker while holding a glass of tea.
Otherwise, life’s good on the dotted line, the boundary between town and country. Standing here like emperor of all that I survey, I reason that if you have to live in a town, there’s still a lot to be said for living on the edge.