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Saturday, January 28, 2006

The Raccoon in the Attic

Unfortunately the title of this blog is not just an expression, like "the elephant in the room". It's only too real.

As far as we can surmise, it all started with a hole in the roof. Several holes in the roof, to be entirely honest. I mean real, honest-to-goodness holes--one was the size of a baseball, maybe a little bigger. The moment I saw them I was immensely grateful for the drought, although I understand if you don't share my enthusiasm. In any case, the holes were patched easily enough (although Aaron might debate my casual use of the word 'easy'). Little did we know that the drama had just begun.

The hole incident was dealt with on Monday, and we thought all was well. Tuesday night about 11 it became very clear that that was not the case. Now we have a history of problems with rodents; we had a rat in our house in Tyler, and we've dealt with squirrels in our attic ever since we moved into this house. But never before had we heard such a persistent, determined scratching and clawing and chewing--right above our bed. "Stupid squirrels", we thought, and Aaron dreamed of adding another notch or two to his BB gun. Wednesday night the scratching was even worse. After several vain attempts at scaring the creature off by banging on the wall and ceiling, Aaron decided to investigate. He came back downstairs a few minutes later with the news. "It's not a squirrel. It's a raccoon, and it's bigger than Molly".

All we could figure is that the raccoon came in through the hole(s) in the roof, and now it was clawing and chewing in a desperate attempt to get out. Armed with this information, and the aforementioned gun, Aaron returned to the attic door to try to locate the animal again and assist its escape attempts, albeit in an entirely different manner than the raccoon had in mind. He was unsuccessful, and we woke to several more scratching episodes that night.

Thursday afternoon, however, he actually crawled inside the attic and came upon the raccoon while it slept. More drama, this time involving a wild raccoon in a small space with my husband and his gun, but Aaron was able to shoot the animal...who promptly fell down a hole in the wall. And then power tools got involved (thank you Clint!), walls were cut, a search ensued, but the wily raccoon was nowhere to be found. Was it dead? Was it alive? Only time (and our noses) could tell!

We received our answer last night around 1:30, and again at 3:00. At one point I fell asleep as Aaron was upstairs, again searching for the immortal raccoon, and I dreamed he had caught it in our cat carrier, took it to the backyard, and shot it. Alas, it wasn't so, as I was reassured around 4 a.m. So the drama continues as we are on a waiting list with Animal Control, who have promised they will come to our house with a trap as soon as they "get to us". In the meantime, I can only assume the raccoon is still an unwelcome and unwilling guest in our home, plotting his next nocturnal escape attempt as I type.

5 comments:

Brooke said...

Wow! I've missed alot this week - you told me on Monday night about the holes in the roof, but I hadn't heard about any of this raccoon business!

I'll blame it on being sick. Dadgum flu.

hoesayfina said...

a raccoon? yikes!

Anonymous said...

This is the stuff great comedy is made of.
(I ended that sentence with a preposition...Does that bother you?)

Amy said...

Nope! In informal or colloquial writing, it's perfectly acceptable. And besides, i do it all the time. It sounds stupid if you try to phrase all sentences to not end in prepositions.

Anonymous said...

Thank goodness, because I couldn't figure out any other way to word that sentence.