Early this past Spring I awoke to hear thumping and galloping in my attic. I couldn't figure out what it was but the cat was as spooked as I was. I went to the pulldown stairs, and pulled on the rope and thumped the stairs a couple of times to frighten whatever was up there. I thought perhaps it might be squirrels that had somehow climbed up under the eaves.
When I pulled the stairs open to take a peek, whatever was up there started throwing Christmas ornaments at me!
I thumped the stairs some more, and turned my stereo on in my bedroom and put on Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, hoping the cannons would frighten them. I aimed it at the attic door and turned it up very loud. Maybe it would frighten them away. Rather I think they began to march across the attic floor.
Later I put rat poison cubes on the stairs and raised them back up again. That evening I was sitting in my office, right where I am now, at the NW corner of my house, when I heard something scurrying overhead, making a frantic effort to get out of the attic. I ran downstairs and turned on the backyard light. I saw three smaller than adult raccoons jumping from the old television antenna on the back of my house to the cable wire, and then across to a tree and to the yard. Someone appeared to have built a nest on the inside of the antenna. They jumped over the back gate and took off. I figured they'd eaten the rat poison and were looking for water. I figured that would be the last of them. I didn't hear them in the attic after that. That was about late March I think.
About mid-April while Zach was in California visiting his father, I was awakened in the middle of the night by my cat, Fritzie. He would run into my room, bounce off the side of my mattress and then run down the stairs. I just yelled at him, and tried to go back to sleep. He did it over and over again. It was about 3:30 a.m. So I got up and went down stairs to get a bottle of water. I get the hiccups sometimes when I get woke up in the middle of the night. As I was standing at the refrigerator reaching in to get a bottle of cold water, I heard noises coming from my pantry, which is off the kitchen and if you open the door it leads down to the basement.
I looked at Fritzie to see if he'd heard what I had. He was on full alert. And he was bravely hiding behind me. I turned on the overhead light, and looked through the slats of the door to the pantry. I couldn't see anything. But I heard some creatures bounding down the stairs. At least two of them. I grabbed a flashlight from the drawer and cautiously opened the pantry door.
Everything had been pulled from the shelves and I could barely get the door open! Stuff was all over the floor. My supply of plastic bags which had been stuffed into a container were all pulled out all over the floor. I began putting things back on the shelves. I wasn't ready to go down the basement to see where the beasts had gone. As I picked up plastic bags I pulled a wastebasket out of the corner. At least I was gonna. A pair of masked eyes looked back at me from the bottom of the wastebasket. It was a smallish raccoon! I looked at her for awhile, and then began stuffing plastic bags in on top of her. She let me do it. I stuffed it full, and then put some paper bags on top of that, and I picked the waste basket up and carried it out to the back porch and down the steps. I carried it out to a tree and dumped it out. She gave me a look, and then ran up the tree.
I hurried back inside. I now knew what kind of beasts I was going to find in the basement! I ventured down the stairs turning on lights as I went. I got to the back room of the basement and found where they'd gotten in. They had torn out the old air-conditioning duct work, and had crawled through the holes.
I closed the door between the front room and the back room and locked it, and went to bed. The next day I called my handy man over to board up the hole where the beasts had broken in. We did a half-hearted job of it, hoping the air-conditioning ducts could be salvaged because we'd heard it was going to be a very hot summer. I didn't think it was in my budget to get a new air-conditioning just then. I called my air-conditioner guy to come fix it. (He never did show up all summer long! I bought a window unit for my office, and endured the heat in the rest of the house all summer. Hopefully I can get this remedied before the next heat wave. If not, I'll just remember how cold I am right now!)
In the meantime, the beasts broke in the next night before I got really mad. I boarded it up good so they couldn't get in, and I was afraid they'd go back up into the attic, so I went out and rented a raccoon trap.
Over the next several weeks I caught a big mother raccoon, three smaller raccoons (including the little girl raccoon I'd already caught in the wastebasket), and three possums. I stuck the cage in the trunk of Zach's car and took them one by one to the park and turned them loose. When I took the little girl raccoon to the park, she didn't want to get out of the cage. Zach got home from California in time to help me with the last couple of them.
The great raccoon adventure helped me to see that I'm not totally helpless, and I can conquer anything when I'm faced with a problem. Nothing is impossible. One can accomplish anything if one sets one's mind to it.
So watch out. That means dreams can come true too...even the ones viewed through rose-colored glasses in times long, long ago. Isn't life grand!?
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