Our house had been invaded. We were under siege. We had no choice other than to engage in battle, night after night, fighting to retake our home. For the first time in my life we were living in an enemy-occupied territory, and it was exhausting.
Naively, when we noticed the first chew marks, after we had convinced ourselves that these truly might be the work of rodents, we thought in singular terms. Mouse. Rat. We might have a rat. Probably just a mouse. Looks like something chewed into this bag of raisin bran. Do you think we might actually have a rat in the house?
It wasn’t until after we’d found a dead rat in a trap, and still laid sleepless at night listening to gnawing inside our walls, that we began to think plural. Rats. We knew we’d been invaded. And that these were not cute little mice.
That’s when our lives changed. We began new morning routines of surveying the downstairs. Checking traps. Looking for rat droppings. Signs. Indicators that they were still running unchecked through the downstairs at night. Under the floors. In the walls. They had the run of everything.
Each morning we’d bleach and disinfect. Every counter. Every surface. Anything left out during the night.
Each evening before we headed upstairs to bed we set traps. Trying to outsmart the rats. Trying out different types of traps. Different types of bait.
We were hearing them. We were seeing signs. Signs of their occupation. A ripped up towel in a kitchen drawer. Droppings. A gnawed banana on the counter. A cereal box with a hole in it. A shredded sheet in the linen closet. The pest control guy had said to cut off their food supply. We’d done that. But still they persisted.
As we sat puzzling about this one morning over a cup of tea we decided to search the house one more time to make sure there wasn’t another food source somewhere that we didn’t know about.
That afternoon we were looking through the bathroom closet which extends back about eight feet under the stairs. We store sleeping bags, backpacks, winter coats and snowsuits in there. As we started digging though everything we noticed some stray pieces of dog food, and rat droppings.
And then we saw it, in the very back of the closet, a 50 pound bag of dog food with a hole about the size of my fist in the top of it. We had forgotten that months earlier there’d been a good price on dog food so we’d gotten an extra bag and stored it in the back of that closet. As we surveyed the pieces of dog food scattered all over the closet we knew we’d found the food source.
We began hauling out all the contents of that closet and throwing it all in a heap in the middle of the bathroom. We stopped when there was just one sleeping bag left in the back of the closet, and it was bulging with bits of dog food.
“Oh gross,” I muttered, as we pulled out that last sleeping bag.
Geoff carried it outside to the garbage can while I swept out the closet. I had just sat down on the lid of the toilet to finish sweeping. I moved the bathroom scale from against the wall to sweep out behind it and out charged a huge rat. Straight at my feet. I was wearing only socks, though why I hadn’t put on my combat boots I don’t know. The rat ran over my toes, and darted into the safety of the pile of winter coats, snowsuits, and sleeping bags still in the middle of the bathroom.
I recall calmly calling out to Geoff, “Honey, can you come here a minute, please?”
Though he and the kids still swear that I screamed.
A second later, 10-year-old Ben popped his head up through the hatch in the hallway, which was just outside the bathroom door.
A year earlier we’d cut a hole in the floor of the hallway closet and put in a hatch with a ladder that led down to the first floor of our house. The hatch allowed the kids to come and go to a large playroom, without first having to go outside and through the garage.
Hearing my calm request for Geoff had peaked Ben’s curiosity. And he suddenly appeared, with his head poking up through the hatch.
“Get off the ladder!” I commanded wildly, envisioning in that moment that the rat would run at him and go down his shirt. Ben, terrified as I was sure he would be, would fall off the ladder and get hurt. On top of being traumatized.
“What’s going on?” Ben asked interestedly, ignoring my command.
In that second, the rat darted from under the pile of winter gear and sleeping bags, out the bathroom door, and straight for Ben’s head, which was right at floor level.
“Get off the ladder!” I commanded again.
Like a deer in the headlights, Ben’s stared wide-eyed as the rat ran directly at him. It charged to the edge of the hatch, hesitated just a second, and then dropped straight down to the playroom below.
I shuddered. Poor Ben. It hadn’t actually jumped onto his head and run down his back to make its escape. But surely it had to have been terrifying to have a huge rat charging right at his head.
I was nauseous, and outraged.
“Oh wow! Did you see that?” Ben exclaimed, clearly thrilled at what he had just experienced. “It ran right at me! And jumped! Like no big deal! That was way cool!”
I was again sitting on the lid to the toilet. Jittery. Exhausted. Trying not to cry. As I contemplated a hotel room for the night, and hiring the pest control guy to come spread toxins throughout our house, Ben could not stop talking with growing enthusiasm.
“That was so cool,” he laughed loudly. “Wow! I mean, I heard Mom scream. So I came up the ladder to see what was goin’ on. And this thing…this rat…came right at my head! I was like, ‘Whoa, Buddy. Slow down or somethin’.’”
Quickly, his recounting of the event started to grate on me. I closed the bathroom closet. Turned off the lights. And shut the door. I told Ben to come upstairs now. And to shut and lock the hatch. Geoff got out the peanut butter and began preparing two more traps. These, for the playroom.
As evening approached I bleached the counters, again, before preparing dinner. My normal interactions with Geoff and the kids were done for the day. I was void of emotion and affect. Shell-shocked. Traumatized by the experiences of the afternoon. I thought about just selling the house. Or torching it.
Ben, on the other hand, could not stop talking. Excitedly. Enthusiastically. Recounting, again and again, with nauseating details of how thrilling his experience with the rat had been. He finally paused for a second, a sudden and welcomed break in his endless monologue.
“Hey, Dad. You don’t suppose if you and me go down and just catch it–like get the nets for the fish tank and net him–that we could keep him, do you?”
Yeah, right! I spit out the words in my mind.
“No, Ben. We’re not going to keep the rat and try to turn it into a pet,” Geoff answered, eyeing me. Realizing, I’m sure, that his marriage hung on that answer.
I went back mindlessly to my dinner preparations. And Ben went back mindlessly to more incessant talk about the rat.
“Hey Dad, do ya think we could bait my casting pole? Then I could just sit in the hallway and put my line down the hatch and jig for it. Just to see if we get somethin’!”
I rolled my eyes.
“We’ll see, Ben,” Geoff answered. And I scoffed.
I went to bed that night listening for more scratching and chewing in the walls. Nothing. I still felt shaken, and emotionally drained. I puzzled for a while over how something which had so traumatized me could have been so delightful for my son. And I hoped that today’s events hadn’t permanently damaged my relationship with him.
Realistically, I knew we’d get that rat. And his wife, his mother and father, siblings, children, grandchildren, extended family, and family friends. We already had a plan to step up our own counterattack. And I was fairly confident that by the time this war was over we would be the victors. And our house would once again be ours.
But for now, we had no choice other than to engage in battle. On every front. We were, after all, under siege.
penniesonmypath 