I was reading on a message board about someone having a problem with mice, and another with rats. Either way, yuck. Living in a city this can be a problem, especially with how compact our dwelling places can be. I imagine, though I’m not familiar with it, living on a farm can have some creatures that do no belong inside take up residence in some unusual places.
One of my all time favorite stories is when I lived in Georgia in volunteer housing. The place I volunteered for had 15 or 20 houses for volunteers, sometimes we got to choose, sometimes we didn’t. Thankfully when I was moving from house to house I had some choice, and the place that was opened up was a newly rehabbed place. One of the other buildings needed some, not a lot, but some rehab work. How did they find this out you might ask? Well, the place had bats. Yup, every night at just dusk o’clock the bats would start pouring out of the tallest part of the building. It took a while, but the rehab crews got in there, fixed the openings and got the bats cleared out of there.
Moving forward, dh and I moved from NJ to NY after 20 months of marriage. This was a work related move and a good one. The apartment we were living in a good one in the back of an old church building. I loved that apartment and would have stayed longer had life’s direction not had some changes.
So the second or third year autum/winter we lived there, I would waken somewhere between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. hearing something. I’d elbow dh and whispering, “did you hear that?!” Of course he didn’t he was sleeping. What we both usually woke up for was the 2:28 a.m. liquid oxygen delivery to the hospital that we lived behind. Oh my gosh the first time I heard that I nearly jumped out of my skin. And then there was the first Sunday morning we lived there, oh that’s a story for another time.
This “did you hear that?” went on for weeks and I thought for a while I was beginning to hear things! I wasn’t, I’m getting to the good part now. I bake, and at one point I baked enough where I kept hazelnuts in the house, not the nut meats, but the actual hazelnuts. One clumsy Saturday afternoon (one of the nights I woke dh up, mind you) I spilled cake batter all over the nuts. I rinsed them off, put them in something to dry and left them on the counter. A few days later I found nuts in the laundry basket in the bathroom. Now, I know darn well that I did not put the nuts in the laundry basket. I’d already cleaned them and laundry detergent and hazelnuts don’t go well together, I think.
We also noticed that the webbing on the antique chair a friend gave us was hanging down. And still, we’re not quite putting three and three together to get 6. That’s another day. So one morning I wake up dh as usual with “did you hear that?” This time he did and then, the fun began. Did I mention that by now we were well into December, we had the Christmas tree up and decorated? We learned that morning that we didn’t have a mouse or a rat, we had a squirrel. A squirrel was living in our apartment! All of the sudden so many things made sense, the noises, the nuts and the morning wake up “didja hear that?!” So, how do we get the squirrel out of the house. I’m standing at the top of the stairs with a foam core board so it can’t go past me, dh opens the window downstairs (hoping it will go out). The squirrel gets freaked out and hides underneath the refrigerator. We finally figured out he’d been sleeping in several places including in the chair, he’d chewed up the webbing to make a nice nest for himself.
Dh calls the maintenance guy (mg) to come over, when he finally does the squirrel is in the chair hiding, having come out from under the ‘fridge. The mg picks up the chair and tries moving it to the door and the squirrel jumps into the Christmas tree. Dh is hitting the bottom of the tree and mg is hitting the top, up and down the squirrel goes. Finally with the door open he runs out and after weeks and weeks of “did you hear that” our tormentor is finally gone! Whew. That was the best nights sleep at home we’d had in months. That I recall we never did find all of the nuts. Dh closed up all the holes we could find.
