Squirrels

Uninvited guests crash holiday quiet

1-4-01

By EDWARD CONE

News & Record

On the day before New Year's Eve, my wife told me she would come home if I cleaned the poop off the dining room table. She was on the phone at my mom's house, to which our family had repaired in the small of the night upon returning from our holiday travels to find that a squirrel had come down our chimney like St. Nick, only with less appealing presents.

We had rolled up the driveway just before midnight on Friday after enduring four states' worth of hellish traffic on I-95, not to mention the Denny's in South Hill, Va. The kids, 7 and 9, were so tired that they went straight to bed, even as their parents stood slack-jawed in the kitchen, trying to figure out who or what had trashed the place.

It didn't take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that our visitor was a squirrel, and it didn't take long for the squirrel itself to make an appearance, emerging in a hurry from beneath a desk and disappearing into the back of the house. For the record, I would like to stipulate that the noise I made was much more of a yell than a scream. My wife may disagree, but she was standing in the driveway at the time and so is not a completely reliable source.

At just about this moment, as we were trying to figure out where the squirrel had gone, our son got out of bed, staggered forward so as to position himself over the white hallway carpet, and began to vomit profusely. It was as if he knew that no holiday story is truly complete without a child throwing up. He blamed the food at Denny's, we thought he had a bug, but either way we still had a squirrel on the loose, so the poor kid didn't get much sympathy.

Where was that squirrel, anyway? Right next door, as it turned out, under our daughter's bed, onto which it leaped when the excitement in the hallway reached a certain pitch. Sydney was not at all pleased to be sharing her bed with a rodent, a sentiment she vocalized loudly enough to scare the nasty thing away again.

That settled it: round one had gone to the squirrel, and by 12:30 we had made our tactical retreat to my mother's house. Now it was Saturday morning, and Sherry, the nice lady from Critter Control, had cornered our uninvited guest in an upstairs bedroom and gently removed it from the premises, cooing to it as she held it in her leather gloves to prevent it from going into shock; my wife, already in shock, was on the phone bargaining with me over the poop-removal conditions necessary for her return.

That's when I saw the second squirrel. It was hiding behind the shutters in the dining room, but its fuzzy tail was just sticking over the top. I told Lisa to call Critter Control and tell them to turn the truck around. Sherry came back. The second squirrel made a magnificent leap onto the dining room table and tore up the stairs to the same bedroom where the other one had taken refuge (it really is the nicest room in the house). We had to chase that bad boy around the room for 15 minutes, but eventually he wound up in a cage and was deported to Kernersville.

The news of the second squirrel was not warmly received by my wife, and learning that this one was a male and the first one a female did not make her any happier. "That means they could do all the disgusting things two animals can do in addition to all the disgusting things one can do on its own," she observed, still sitting at my mom's kitchen table. The suggestion that mating season was preferable to birthing season gave her only modest solace.

Eventually Lisa accepted the fact that the squirrels had been exorcised and she returned home, where she set about a cleaning campaign of a scope and ferocity that I, who would have happily brushed the filth off the couch with my hand and watched football, could hardly comprehend. By yesterday she didn't even jump when I pretended to see a squirrel in the house.

If anybody's got an old Brunswick Stew recipe, though, she'd probably take it.

Edward Cone is a News & Record columnist.

Last update: 1/7/2003; 3:08:51 PM.