On Monday of this week I dropped my car off for service. It was time for regular maintenance – oil change and tire rotation – and my car’s blower motor was making noise. It rattled on the low setting and it sounded like a prop airplane on high. The dealership informed me that a new motor had to be ordered and that I’d have to wait until today, Tuesday, for repairs to be completed.

I received a call this morning that the root cause of the problem was that a rodent, likely a mouse, had built a nest in and around the blower. Fortunately, after a good cleaning, the original blower performed as quietly as always, which is fortunate, as I’d would have had to pay out of pocket for a replacement. Rodent nests are not covered under warranty. This comes about a month after I had to pay to my sewer line cleared, likely due to tree roots. And with the weather turning cold, we’re beset by earwigs … again.

Nature is invasive and assertive. It’s constantly trying to make us ill, grow into our space, nest where we don’t want it, bite us, sting us, flood us out, poison us, kill us. Nature wants us out of the way. Nature wants us dead so that it can feast on our rotting carcass. There’s always a virus, a spore, a rodent, a storm, a predator, an invasive species waiting to take advantage.

And it really doesn’t matter if we care, if we’re paying attention, who is in office or whether we’re getting along with each other. Nature is just waiting for us to slip up, wait too long, take it for granted.

You’d think we’d learned by now after years of fighting malaria and foot rot and bed bugs and fleas, mold and plague and floods. And earwigs.

But no, we continue to undercut one another, jostle for political position and power while all the while the rodents are moving in.