Everything Is Fine

Some things to note regarding this story: 1) I embrace all things female, and am, therefore, a gatherer in life and not a hunter. Mark once told me that as a pioneer I’d make it a day in the wild before the wagon train threw me over the side and never looked back. 2) Cats are absolutely worthless in a crisis. 3) All previous things I have ever written about wanting to be in nature are bullshit.

In the early days of spring, before a single thing had even bloomed, stink bugs started showing up on the windows in the living room. This had never happened prior to last year. I blame global warming even though I have no proof or even looked it up to see if this was true. All I know is that Mark and I bought this house 28 years ago and beetles hanging out on the windows for months never used to be a problem and now they are. At first there would be a few here and there. They are the “C” Team of bugs, slow and dumb and easy to kill which you are not supposed to do because once squished, they stink (hence the name). In the beginning, I would scoop them up and let them outside where they would fly away, only to land on the outside of the window and try to get back in. On nice days when I had the windows open, they’d whistle for the relatives and there would be a reunion in my living room. I’d get distracted trying to work from home or talking on the phone and have to stop what I was doing to take care of them. After weeks of hanging out in the living room they got bored and decided to move upstairs to the bedroom. Since they have hard backs, I’d hear them land on the blinds, or even worse, get under the lamp shade and bounce back and forth inside it. Twice one of them landed on my arm while I was reading, and after that happened whenever I saw one I’d grab a Kleenex and wrap it around the lumbering doofuses and drop them in the toilet. One of them had the audacity to fly right back out and when I found it I smashed it with a poetry book so the end was quick but probably peacefulish.

While they were making a home on the inside, the cats were dropping dead mice on the back porch like they it was their only job in life. Every day there’d be one or two on the porch, and one morning when there was five of them, I called somebody to rescreen the porch. He used a heavier duty screen that the cats couldn’t tear and it cost plenty, but between the warmer temps taking care of the stink bugs and a refurbished screened-in porch, I finally felt like I was free from beetle and rodent removal.

And then the universe said, “Hold my beer.”

Before dawn on a Monday morning I woke up to the sound of something scratching the carpet in the bedroom. I turned the light on and saw nothing. Five minutes later I heard it again, and that time when I turned the light on there was a POSSUM IN THE BEDROOM standing by the door. I screamed. The possum turned to look directly at me like “Whoa, it’s cool,” and crawled underneath the dresser. On shaaaaaaky legs I stood on the bed, reached over, slowly opened the door, and then made a beeline for the office beside the bedroom, slamming the door behind me. I bent over, hands on knees, my heart pounding right out of my chest and told myself to thinkthinkthink.

And the only thing that my brain could think to tell me was, “Kath, you’ve got a MFing possum in your MFing house,” which, duh, I already knew so I laid on the floor in a fetal position and waited for stress to finish me off. And I waited and waited and waited while my heart thumped thumped thumped and nothing happened so I got dressed for a Possum Hunt.

I’m kidding. I wasn’t going to hunt for a possum. I was going to go to the Shell station down the street to fill the gas can to the brim, come home, splash it all over the house, and then throw a match over my shoulder as I walked away for good. First, though, I had to get out of there so I slowly opened the office door, tip-toed out of Dodge and bolted down the stairs. All morning things (especially possums and arson) should start with coffee and while that was brewing I wondered who I could text to rescue me. I could text nobody because my phone was upstairs with You-Know-Who. So I posted a plea on Facebook for any early risers, an SOS call from my Hindenburg and googled how to get rid of a possum.

It is highly unusual for a possum to ever enter a home. And yet…..

At 6:30 my neighbor walked down the street, the first of the Possum Posse to arrive. She sat on the porch with me while we both drank coffee and then volunteered to look for the possum. A few minutes later she came down with my phone in hand, said she saw no sign of the possum but that she didn’t look real hard, and called her husband to bring a trap. In the meantime, my daughter came over with their terrier who had been hunting possums under their deck for weeks. Between the dog and the two worthless cats who were in for the day, we had three animals against one, and none of them showed much interest in finding the squatter.

While my neighbor’s husband went to get the trap, we all started talking and I was gently asked if maybe I dreamed there was a possum in the house because really, who has a possum come into their bedroom? I said, “I don’t think so,” but immediately thought maybe I did, maybe I’d caused all of this commotion over a dream, maybe I am taking a swan dive off the deep end, that people who knew me would run into each other in the grocery store next to the beets and say, “She seemed like she was doing better after her husband died and then I heard that she started seeing possums. Yes, I know, possums, and now they say she just lays in her bed all day long staring at the door.”

My neighbor’s husband arrived with a small trap, and between them and my daughter they all went possum hunting upstairs. Maggie, my oldest child, the one you have to scrape off the ceiling when there is a spider, went looking in the closets and under the bed for the possum, and it’s a little late in the game to find out she must belong to somebody else. There was no sign of Mr. P. and the captains of the Possum Posse decided the situation called for more traps and left to go to Lowe’s. Before leaving my neighbor said, “Everything is fine. Wherever he is now he’s asleep and won’t bother you.” They seemed to have mistaken me for a big girl who could hang out in my house with a possum like IT WAS NO BIG DEAL. If it weren’t for the smidgen of pride I barely had left I would have clung to their pant legs and begged them to stay.

Back they came with two more traps, baited with cat food and the fervent, sweaty prayers of me who suddenly needed confirmation that there really was a possum on the premises. They decided to leave for a bit and my daughter and I started talking. I told her that one morning I was drinking coffee and could hear something crunching cat food. The cats were still outside and three times I got up to look and there was nothing there. Then twice there was the most disgusting poop in the upstairs bathroom and I thought the cat was sick, and DEAR GOD that had been four days earlier. “There’s been a possum in my house for four days, Maggie!! Roaming around, going upstairs, having a good time like he was a paying roommate. Sweet jeezus, tell me how somebody has a possum in their house for four days and not have any idea???” And Maggie said, “There there, Mom, you’ve been under some stress. How were you supposed to know you were living with a possum? It could happen to anyone.”

No it couldn’t. I’m certain most people would know there was a possum in their house before four days had gone by. They would know before it came into their bedroom to wake them up. They would know when the cat food was always gone. They would know when it had diarrhea on their bathroom floor twice. All of them would know except me.

As we were talking, I wondered if it was in the downstairs closet because there is a small opening in it that backed up to the stove. Maggie offered to look and I clapped and said “Yeah, girl, you go do that,” and she marched off to get her Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom badge and Patrol Leader of the Week. Reporting back from base camp, she whispered, “Welp, he’s in there but he’s sleeping right now,” like we had some newborn who’d been up all night with colic and wore his little self out. “Wake him up,” I said, “and tell him the jig is up and he has to leave. Now.” She went back in, slowly opened the closet door, positioned the trap right outside of it, and closed the bedroom door behind her on the way out. She came out eager and energized because now we were getting somewhere in this hunt, and I looked over at her and said, “You know what I want? I want a boring life, a regular boring life like everybody else has. Is that too much to ask?” “Oh geez, Mom,” she said, “you weren’t meant for a boring life. Not ever. Besides this is exciting.”

And five minutes later we heard Possum Pete go in the trap. Maggie called our neighbors back and they came and got him and offered to set him loose in a kingdom far far away. Everything was fine and ol’ Pete diarrheaed all the way out the door as a heartfelt and pungent farewell.

Some more neighbors came and secured the perimeter and it was determined that the possum likely came in through the screen door. I had a friend over a few nights earlier and we had a glass of wine on the porch and then I walked her out before I closed everything up. By then the possum must have come through the kitchen door without me knowing.

At 10:30 that night when every light in the entire house was still on because of my PTSD, a different neighbor texted me. She had a pack of cigarettes stowed away for especially high stress days if I was interested. I poured two glasses of whiskey and met her outside. We went over to the creek and sat alongside it, drinking and smoking until midnight, talking about how life upends you and knocks you flat. How just when you think it can’t get crazier a possum shows up in your bedroom, and how decades earlier when you were delivered into the world, the only instructions left for your parents was to make sure that one never lived a boring life.

Postscript: I have the most incredible neighbors and they have my unending gratitude for possum hunting, ciggies, and a million other things.