Opossums

So, a couple months ago I was downstairs playing a videogame or something and I heard some scratching or pounding or something. So I figured we had a rat or some other creature living in the space under our upstairs floor. So Karen and I went to Ace Hardware and bought a couple rat traps, baited them with peanut putter, and placed them where we thought the rats might be able to reach. Well, apparently we didn't place them very well because nobody went for them for days.

One day I saw something furry pass underneath a tiny round hole we had in our bathroom floor, so I was pretty sure it was a rat. Well, we didn't really want to get poison because we didn't want dead animals rotting inside our house, but we heard that there's poison that makes them go outside in search of water, so they die outside your house. So I went to the store and bought some of that poison and stuffed it down the hole in our floor. Well, for a while we didn't hear any more growling or pounding noises that the “rats” had been making, so we thought perhaps it had worked.

Well, during one of the times that Karen was in Texas with her mom, I was playing a game late at night downstairs and heard the “rat” making its usual noises. Then I heard a urination noise and then I heard a slow but steady “drip...drip...drip”. It took me not very long to realize that it was dripping directly onto the TV right in front of me. So I pulled everything off the TV (our wedding picture, a maté from Karen's brother) and quickly wiped down everything with pine sol and bleach. Then I realized that we really needed to do something about this rodent problem soon.

So I had the missionaries come over and we pulled out our bathtub and removed the rotten floorboards underneath. I was altogether too curious, so I got a flashlight and looked underneath the floor. Sure enough, I saw two little eyes staring at me from out of the darkness--just staring and blinking. I had finally found our rat. So I had the Elders look at it. Well, one of them said “That's a 'possum.” So we then realized that we really had opossums, not rats.

Well, we didn't really want opossums running around our house, so placed a board over the hole in the floor and put the tub back on top of it so that they couldn't get out and climb in bed with us. But they kept making noise and waking us up at night--pounding and growling and fighting. So I lifted up the board I had placed and stuck in more poison. A few days later we were still hearing noises, but we started hearing them downstairs at the base of the wall, rather than up in the ceiling. Well, we didn't hear anything last Friday night, so Saturday when we were cleaning the house I asked Karen if she was up to helping me pull away the wood paneling along the base of the wall to ascertain the status of the lovely opossum. Surprisingly, she consented and we proceeded to pry the paneling off the wall. Behold the opossum!

(Click play for some happy growling sounds.)

It did take a lot of courage to pull the little furry guy out--even after I poked him and made sure he was indeed on the other side of the veil. But even then we realized we weren't done. He apparently had friends down there with him--very old friends. We removed three other deceased opossa, whose pictures we did not take and hope that you wouldn't want to see. After depleting all of the tenants in our opossum burial ground, we concluded our ceremony by purifying the area with every known cleaning solution and replacing the panelboard. We gave the marsupials a proper burial in our garbage can--the outside one.