Set a splendid table and the creatures come calling

Set a splendid table and the creatures come calling
                        

More than half a lifetime ago at the beginning of my career, my home base was a desk in the corner of an office at City Hall. I shared the room with the secretary to the service director, who by default fielded a broad and endlessly entertaining variety of “complaint” calls.

I’d often keep one ear open to Karen’s half of the conversation, and if it seemed at all like something I’d like to become involved in, I would enthusiastically point to myself and mime an imaginary phone at my ear. Without hesitation Karen would politely transfer the best of the calls my way. Some of the ensuing conversations have been enshrined in my list of all-time favorites.

Take for instance the woman with a thick Cajun accent that called from somewhere out in the township to complain that since she’d moved up from Louisiana with her two hound dogs, she’d been spending double on dog food.

“There’s a ‘possum that comes in the night and eats up half’n all my hound’s kibblin’!” she said.

A dutiful public servant, I worked hard to gently convey to her that first, no one from City Hall would be out to shoot the critter as she had suggested. Next, that feeding her hound dogs on the back porch at night might not be the best idea. And finally, that if she simply fed her dogs half as much, then the other half wouldn’t be left over for the opossum in the first place.

As was often the case, logic was met with a dial tone. I was left to imagine the happy life of a 40-pound, kibble-fed opossum curled up each night next to a pair of anemic Redbone Coonhounds. The moral of the story is that when you roll out the red carpet for wild critters, sooner or later they’re going to heed the call.

When my daughter Charlotte moved to a nice suburban spot with a big yard and a woodlot just over the hill, I joked that it was only a matter of time before a raccoon followed her feline through the cat door into her basement. While I was right on the timing, I was wrong on the species.

It was the middle of the morning, and Charlotte, enormously pregnant and exhibiting extreme “nesting behavior,” was changing sheets in the basement guest room in preparation for her mother and me, who would tend to the new baby’s brothers while the deal went down at the hospital. Sensing an odd presence, she stopped to look around the room suspiciously. Finally turning back to the task at hand, she saw the light on the nightstand move slightly and froze to witness a shoe-sized, rat-like figure squeeze its way up onto the tabletop — a pink-nosed, beady-eyed, rat-tailed baby opossum.

The screams still echo in that quiet suburban neighborhood.

The young mother’s shriek carried my son-in-law Andrew to the scene in an instant, where, after careful consideration and a consulting call to the critter wrangler of the family (me), the intruder was nudged into a large, clear-sided plastic storage container where it provided a brief but joyfully entertaining wildlife encounter for the boys. After a drink and a meal, it waddled its way back into the woodlot, none the worse for the experience.

The cat door is currently being reimagined, if not fully reconsidered.

Kristin and John Lorson would love to hear from you. Write Drawing Laughter, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email John at jlorson@alonovus.com.


Loading next article...

End of content

No more pages to load