A quiet street, death at every turn

The death toll at our house is high and climbing.

It seems nothing is safe from the hapless, savage touch of mi familia.

Not flora, not fauna, not hope—nothing.

In a garden-variety serial-killing family such as mine, it is often the dad who strikes first, and so I’ve stuck with tradition and gotten things rolling.

First to go: the flora—pretty much all of it. Victim No. 1: citrus.

Plump and deep green, my emergent spring crop of limes conjured images of chilled homemade mojitos. I could almost feel the sting of limejuice squirting me in the eye, just about smell the backyard mint I would muddle with lime wedges before adding homemade simple syrup, white rum and a splash of club soda. Ah, such sweet quenching was in my future.

“You should get some spray for your fruit tree,” my friend Woody advised me in the spring.

What’s he talking about? The fruit was textbook—not a blemish. “OK, whatever you say, Woods,” I told him. I’ve got a cousin with 40 acres of citrus trees. I lived in Florida. I know citrus, pal.

Kiwi fruit. The limes turned to kiwi fruit—arid, brown little stones with only traces of green. “Are they supposed to look like moon rocks?” I wondered.

With morbidity’s momentum I set my hapless suburban aim upon a variety of targets within range.

Tomatoes. Cucumbers. Basil.

Dead.

A pair of evergreen trees some kid at the nursery assured me would survive forever on the front porch in the pair of expensive pots he sold me.

Dead.

The lawn.

Dead.

When considered as a body of work, the carnage has been ghastly. And there’s enough to go around.

Our first-grade daughter is a quick study in the art of destruction, but when it comes to unwitting killing, she’s a prodigy. Like a mad scientist she spends hours scooping dip nets into a nearby canal, dumping her squirming captives into shallow pales of water. She regards them in wide-eyed awe and genuine affection, even as they boil in the summer sun.

She squeezes helpless amphibians with loving, merciless enthusiasm. “Look! I found another tree frog, daddy!” she says, gripping it tighter than a rookie executive shakes hands.

“Isn’t he cute?”

“I don’t think his eyes should be bugging out like that,” I suggest. “How about we set him free?”

“Noooo!” she weeps. “I love him!”

She approached me in the backyard recently, clearly excited. In one palm squirmed a helpless bass fingerling, in the other a perfectly formed bream no larger than a silver dollar. To those desperately flopping, convulsing fish, her beaming smile must have seemed grotesque.

“Put them back in the water—quickly!” I blurted. “They’re dying.”

“They’re not dying, Daddy!” she pleaded. “I just want to keep them for a little while.”

But reluctantly and in tears, her shoulders slumped in resignation. She turned, reared back and launched them toward the water—a couple of hurtling, fishy baseballs, oblivious survivors of the wild perils of Baton Rouge’s suburban frontier.