I called my grandmother Mono. (Yeah, not my fault. My oldest cousin couldn’t say “Mother” and the nickname stuck. Mono was emotionally attached to it.)

Some of my best childhood memories revolve around Mono. Huge Sunday dinners with her famous fried chicken (she took the recipe to her grave with her.) The never-empty cookie bin. Choosing a book from the upstairs bookcase and then curling up on the couch in the sunroom to read it. Playing marbles (she had a giant paint can filled with them!) Weaving potholders – my sister and cousin and I wove an infinite number of potholders over the years. Looking at her collection of butterflies pinned to green felt. And staring with gruesome fascination at a glass jar containing the perfectly preserved corpse of a mole floating inside.

Mono had a vendetta against moles.

Mono’s house sat on a decent-sized piece of property. When it was first built it was in the country outside of Frankfort, Kentucky, but by the time I came along the city had surrounded it. Still, there was plenty of room for the grandchildren to run free. My sister and I even had a pony stabled there for a while. (My dad bought it from a carnival. Silly pony. All it would do was walk around and around in circles!) There were walnut trees, and we’d pick up the walnuts, peel off the outer hull, dry them out, and take them inside to crack open with metal nutcrackers.

And there were moles. Seemingly hundreds of them.

Or maybe it was just one mole, but if so he was a busy little rodent. He created mole runs all over Mono’s yard, which she considered an encroachment on her personal space.

Maybe this industrious little critter was intent on revenge for the formaldehyde-preserved remains of his grandfather. I don’t know, but I remember Mono stomping through the yard, trampling down the mole runs heel-to-toe like a woman walking a field sobriety test. (That comparison, by the way, would offend Mono greatly. She was a strict teetotaler.) She tried everything she could to get rid of the mole. She drove wooden stakes into the molehills as if trying to kill a vampire. Any noxious or deadly liquid was poured down the molehills, like dirty dishwater. I have a vivid memory of Mono, her hands protected by hand-woven potholders, carrying a big pot of sizzling grease out to the yard and dumping it down a molehill, a glint of single-minded purpose in her eyes.

What, you may ask, sparked these memories?

I have just spent forty minutes in my backyard, trampling down mole runs! I’d hammer a wooden stake into the molehills, but there are more hills than I have stakes! The evil little rodents are destroying my yard, and I’m prepped for battle. I have the memory of Mono as a mentor, and I. Will. Not. Be. Defeated.

Excuse me, I have to go deep fry something so I will have a pot full of sizzling-hot oil.

If you have any suggestions for driving moles out of my yard, please post them!