Beaver Wars and Downsizing

We spent the summer downsizing.  Our home by the lake was becoming a stress factor in our lives, sadly.  My husband, who turned 75 this year, had had enough of contending with the beavers.

When we moved there in 2009 we were excited about living with wild creatures that we could watch every day from our back window.  Summer evenings a beaver or two would swim around in the lake, their triangular heads at the surface creating a V shaped ripple.  They swam fast, doing occasional somersaults and smacking their tails on the water in loud reverberation.

We could not understand how some of the neighbours around the lake could be so cruel as to set traps or even shoot at the beavers.  Once I even saw a poor beaver who was missing a paw, which he must have chewed off in order to free himself from a trap.

But after a few years we noticed that the bottom of our lot was becoming badly eroded.  On closer investigation we found that the beavers had dug a large cave under the bottom of our lot, and a hole to come up on our side of the fence.  We quickly filled in the hole before they could come up and chew down our trees.  Our next door neighbour had told us that they came home from holidays once to find that the beavers had taken down their pear tree.  I had visions of a row of beavers sitting on the pear tree log munching on pears.

Then we noticed that the water level had risen because of the beavers damming up the outflow at the end of the lake.  Sid went down there every day for months and cleared away the dams, which the beavers would re-build every night.  Finally after several calls to the city parks administration they started sending a crew to do it.

But this year a whole new problem began.  Early in the year Sid noticed that a big mudslide was being built against the bottom of the chain-link fence, reinforced with sticks stuck through it.  Every day he went down and dismantled it, and even laid down chicken wire hoping that would deter them.  Well, they seemed to think he was helping them reinforce their mud.  Pretty soon the structure was getting higher and higher.  Sid was nearly going out of his mind with frustration!

Still owing money on our house, and both of us retired, we could not imagine borrowing more money in order to build a rock wall down there.  Taking in foreign students had helped us make ends meet for the past nine years, but we had come to a point where we just wanted to simplify our lives.

We began to pray about it and look into real estate matters.  Amazingly everything worked out according to our prayers.  Thanks be to God, here we are in September now, pretty much settled in our new home.

Downsizing has not been easy!  Especially for me.  I had kept collections of school materials, teaching materials, souvenirs and household items accumulated over 64 years!  What a mix of emotions going through it all.  Floods of memories both good and bad.  It has felt cleansing to do that purge, and I still have many boxes of things to go through and eliminate more stuff.

Currently still in the stage of picture-hanging, at least we no longer have stacks of boxes obstructing the main living areas, and I finally feel that I can get back to writing!  Yay!  I even finished reading a novel yesterday.  The bursitis in my right shoulder from heavy lifting is subsiding.  Now to catch up on paying the bills for moving vans and a few pieces of furniture that we bought for our new home.