Me: Babe, can you stop making that noise with your leg please?
Vero: Uh, I thought that was you.
The beginning of an adventure at dinner last night.
We got up slowly from the table and realized the sound was definitely some other thing in the house. We went downstairs armed with broom sticks and a dustpan (where’s a baseball bat when you need one?) but the sound stopped. We returned to the table and a few minutes later the sound started again.
We eventually deduced it was something inside the chimney of the wood stove. Thank the lord that it was there, and not up in the ceiling tiles like I originally had thought! The question, is, how to get to it? What was it exactly? We asked these questions back and forth and wondered how we would deal with this.
At one point we realized it had gone all the way down into the wood stove. Of COURSE this had to be the time that I never bothered cleaning the glass window to the fireplace so visibility was quite low. Vero grabbed a flashlight and she said she could definitely see something moving in there whereas I saw nothing. She said it looked like a mouse tail. Fair enough, we can handle a mouse!
Armed with a garbage bag to catch the critter on its way out, and Vero armed with the broom in case I missed it…I explained that if our grandmothers could smack a mouse with a broom, we surely could!
So we opened up the door a little…but nothing much was happening. It’s kind of hard to poke a broom inside the wood stove and expect a critter to come towards us! If anything it’s going to shy away! So we opened up the door a little more.
This is when all hell broke loose. As I remember it Vero yelled out “It’s big…IT’S BIG! IT’S BIG!!!” and in my mind I’m thinking “What the heck is it?”. Vero also recalls that I jumped back into the stairwell at one point screaming like a little girl, but I definitely don’t remember that part. 🙂
So out of nowhere this brown thing scurries right past my garbage bag and onto Vero’s broom stick and climbs up it. To put this into context, this is all happening in one second flat. This sucker is fast.
The memories of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation come to mind and I yell “SQUIRREL!!!”.
Yes, we had a squirrel in the basement. Trish would have fainted. So here the squirrel is running around in the basement and things start popping into my head. “Don’t let it get in behind the bar! It better not go into the well area! Ahhh! Get it out from behind the freezer!”
Luckily we were smart enough to close the doors and try and get it to go upstairs and out through the garage. This critter was cunning…it bounded over furniture, climbed my guitar, had a run over the drum kit, hid behind some boxes a few times…at one point hid INSIDE the freezer (in behind it where the mechanics are). When it got close to the wood stove it would scale the brick wall like Spider-Man and would jump from the wall through the air towards us. Screams were heard for miles away…it was hilarious, thrilling and annoying all at the same time. At one point I thought I had shattered the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling as my broom stick went for a wild swing.
EVENTUALLY we finally got the squirrel to start walking up the stairs. Vero left me in the dust as she slammed the door to trap her and the squirrel inside the stairwell. I followed once I knew the squirrel had moved outside.
Luckily for us the thing had jumped into a grocery bag. Perfect! I scooped up the grocery bag, ran through the garage and at the last moment realized it was trying to jump out so I dropped it onto the driveway but then accidentally stepped on its tail and it ran back into the garage! Doh!
But at this point, the job was done. We realized the scared thing would hide out until we left. We left the garage door open and assumed it would leave once the coast was clear.
At least, that’s what we’re thinking is happening as I type this. Who knows if the squirrel decided that his life was so boring that he would rather have a few giants chasing after him with broomsticks.
We surveyed the scene afterward and shared tales of our hunt and laughed at the absurdity of girls screaming and how I jumped five feet backwards when we realized it was definitely larger than a mouse.
Good times had out in the country!