It was a quarter to 5 on a Wednesday morning near the end of April. Just got out of the shower, crossed the house to the kitchen, walked into the kitchen, flipped on the light and a big gray animal thumped off the chair and scurried across the kitchen floor, flattened himself and disappeared under the oven.

First let me say that Monday evening, the kitchen was swarmed with 470,000 plus carpenter ants flooding through the electrical outlet behind the refrigerator. I discovered this around 9p.m. and was horrified! Ran to Walgreens and got Raid at Mama’s advice, came back and saturated the demons. Two hours later I went back in and vacuumed them all up. So disgusting. I swore I would call Nozzle Nolen the first chance I got after classes the next day but...things got busy...you know how it is. So as I stood paralyzed, not breathing, waiting for the visual imaging to sink in for explanation, I also realized that this was a new pestilence of Exodus proportions, divine intervention, that I could not COULD NOT procrastinate another day.

How long I stood motionless and speechless I cannot say. The animal was a rat about the size of your foot. As I stared in disbelief, realizing I had taken a step backward into the dining room, I heard metal banging and then he poked his head out to launch a getaway from under the oven and I freaked—jumped back and hollered. He turned back under the oven. I remember thinking being very glad that I am a hollerer, not a screamer. Weird but true—it was a proud moment. Still I couldn’t move for a very very long time. To this day I have no idea where he went from there but he somehow got back out of the house.

Needless to say, I didn’t make breakfast. I didn’t gather lunch or even water bottles. I did, as I recall, risk making tea, never taking my eyes off the oven, and verbally expressing loudly everything that I was about to do and what I was doing, just to keep the monster fully hidden from view. I think the only way I got up the courage was to remind myself that he was far more scared than I was....

First chance I got, I called Nozzle Nolen and a guy named Dean met me at home that night. He ultimately quoted about $600 total, wanting a check for $300 before he left. I was depressed because I had wanted to get Mamandad a new tv and this took a chunk out of that intention. But then after he left I checked my email and my check had come and as it turned out it was the check that they didn’t take out insurance for that pay period which was almost exactly $300. Nice.

Dean set traps under the oven and up in the attic. He told me how rats, roof rats, get into a house and he found evidence all through the house. I had left the sliding glass doors open that night before and so I asked if they could have gotten in through the screen which was pulled out at the bottom...he said unlikely, there was plenty of evidence there had been activity in the attic, but I confirmed I had never heard anything from up there, not even squirrels across the shingles outside...he mentioned that there was evidence they’d been in and out of the house before—behind the washer/dryer, under the oven, even (and this is so sick I don’t even want to record it) there was a poop between the bed and the closet in my room so no doubt that trespasser had gone in there the night before the morning I caught him! OR during the day after I left perhaps as he was trying to get out... Horrifying to think they were coming in and out every night as I left the doors open!!! But I had closed up for the past couple of weeks...and this was the earliest I had been up and I had not yet turned on the tv so the usual sounds didn’t get rid of them maybe. I had also closed up the house before I left so I wonder how the rat got out while I was at school. But I’m not spending a lot of time thinking about it.

That night after Dean had been there to set traps, I thought I might have heard a scuffle and thud from upstairs but apparently not because nothing was ever found. That night and several nights after I had REAL TROUBLE going to sleep, that’s for sure!

Todd came out on Saturday and checked...then about every three days for the next two weeks. Finally on Monday (5.10.10) he said he thought we could start the "exclusion" process—sealing up the house, starting with the screen against the porch which I asked him about because clearly it was busted, and clearly to me it was how the rodents were getting in. The Thursday before Mother’s Day weekend I came out here and cleaned thoroughly and that’s when, to my horror, I found piles of rat poop behind the tools I have in the corner for outside. Well a lot of that was fairly recent because it hadn’t been that long before I had cleaned it so I was sick! I cleaned it all out thoroughly and took a long hot shower after.

Then the next morning, Friday, I saw five or six fresh poops out there and they were not lizard poops! So I sprayed them with bleach just to kind of neutralize how gross it was so Mamandi could sit out there over the weekend. Then when Todd came back Monday and saw them he said he was pretty sure they were lizard poops but he couldn’t swear to it without a microscope and I gave him my teacher look that said I wasn’t as stupid as he looked, because they were rat poops.

So Thursday, knowing he was coming Friday or Saturday, I decided to take the two giant sticky panels out from under the oven and put them by the screen where it was unrolled, then I went all the way out on the patio and poked the rubber thingy back against the screen to refasten it but only half heartedly—that way it would be less likely to be a poor lizard coming through there and getting stuck rather than a rat who would easily come through to get to the slim jims on the sticky pad. It’s why they’re called rats—they don’t care what they tear up to get through to the tasty stuff. But still can’t figure out what it was about the patio that communicated to them that it was a potty. Anyway, during the night it occurred to me...what would I do if I DID catch something?

Friday morning, as the sun began to slowly send out rays, just before time to leave for school, I carefully chose the angle of my checking to see if I’d caught anything and I saw a tail curled on it and a leg...didn’t seem to be moving. A tad disturbing but also gratifying (those WERE rat poops! I KNEW it!) and I went on my way to school. I certainly wasn’t going to try to do anything with a dead rat before school! I was also entertaining the notion it would be just fine right there until Todd came back even if that wasn’t until Saturday. I was then under the mistaken impression that those sticky pads somehow also were poisonous.

After school I had a chiropractic appointment and Mastellone and I swapped rat stories. They lived on a small stretch of acreage with a barn and a gorgeous owl and never had rats until the neighbor cut down trees just at the lot line so the owl would move away so he could build there (what a jerk) and after that, when the owl did move away, it wasn’t but a couple of months before Mastellone heard the scuttle and shuffle of rats in the barn. He said he learned a very valuable lesson about those giant sticky pads. Rats can get stuck in them for a minute or two and then they can walk off with them stuck to them and keep struggling and end up dying somewhere rather hidden until the stench emanates. What a yucky yucky story!!! He also advised me the minute I got home to get an old towel I wasn’t planning to keep and just throw it over the thing and dispose of it with minimal visual connection. I agreed that was a very very good idea.

Got home around 5 or 5:30 and had been gathering the courage to see for sure that it was a rat and not a giant lizard tail...I looked through the sliding glass doors and ... the pad was gone! I looked all around the screened porch from the safety behind the closed glass doors. It took a minute to register that the rat had no doubt regained its composure and managed to pull himself and that pad back through the screen! I looked as well as I could onto the patio beyond...nothing...I gathered all my courage and went out to the screen and looked as far into the yard as I could...nothing. Unbelievable, where could it have gone! Did another animal come and take it away? I ventured through the screen door out into the courtyard and looked. Nothing. I went further out and about and saw nothing under the bushes or in the boston ferns. Nothing behind the oak tree or around the other side of the bay kitchen window, nothing. Freaky freaky.

Came back into the house to get the phone because I had to call Todd anyway and of course I had to tell him this! I noticed he had called at some point but instead of listening to his message I just called back through. He mentioned having been sick this week—well it was a crazy week for me too. And he asked if "tomorrow" was still okay to come work on the screen and I said sure but I had to tell him what happened. So I told him the whole story—getting the sticky pads out, seeing the tail and leg that morning, Mastellone’s story of the barn rats, then coming home to find nothing anywhere so that rat made off with the sticky pad or another animal got him or something.

He chuckled and said, "Well, as it turns out, I had to be in the neighborhood today on another job and dropped by your place to measure out the screen area for tomorrow and saw you had caught something so I just took care of it for you." We laughed and I thanked him and then he said, still chuckling, "Let me tell you this. If you had caught a rat strong enough to get up and pull that pad through the screen and get off the property without it getting caught up in anything in your courtyard and disappear, I would be advising you to find another neighborhood to live in because that would just be too much rat! And I would be finding another line of work!" We laughed.

So now the screen is fixed and next week begins the exclusion of the roof areas as well as traps being set out in various places around the yard.