Then suddenly I *love* facebook, unfolder of information such as fallen fruit which I’d never heard of before receiving a facebook invite to this week’s nocturnal fruit forage in LA. It seems like local chapters are encouraged, though? Yes? Bay area anyone?
This won’t come mid-narrative for some of you, dear some of you all who deserve my sincerest apologies for talking about nothing else for a month now, that is, the RATS and the OPOSSUMS. Some kinds of rats really love avocados. A nocturnal fruit forage seems like a good step in my rat and opossum self-directed training. Isn’t that what the rats and opossums do? Nocturnal public fruit foraging?
This post is a public update that the opossum catcher came to the house yesterday and set some traps (the catch and release kind). The bait is STRAWBERRY NEWTONS. Most cats I guess don’t like strawberry newtons. 24 hours later there’s nothing in the traps yet. But when the opossum catcher showed up yesterday, he did have an opossum in the back of his truck, trapped at another location. A grown-up, cat-sized one. And so, my first.. sighting? viewing? (Suzanne and I googled “possum” a few weeks ago at my obsessive urging, and wow when that first picture came up it really did us in. Different, but related, I think, to what may or may not be living in the ceiling. I still have a lot to learn obviously.) This story is going backwards or something but I should say somewhere very clearly that I have not been having the easiest time ever with the sounds in my walls and ceiling, my ceiling and walls and ceiling and especially not with the sounds in the wall right behind my bed. At first I thought there were some overactive cats upstairs who only played at night. With many, many rolling balls. Then, when one of these denial-cats fell down into the wall one early morning, I employed, somewhat shakily, a fantasy concerning a glossy disney character who simply wanted the opportunity to make soup at a fancy restaurant. So I have been of course! It goes without saying! Googling opossum, oh, several times a day, ever since it was introduced as a marsupial alternative maker of THE SOUNDS. Opossum + loud noise + wall + babies + mating season + geography. I’m getting there. (to a search string a little wider than myself)
And moving ever closer to an embodied opossum: last week Samantha told me about seeing one at Sulphur Creek and I’m hoping to visit with her and Jonas in May. Yesterday’s opossum was understandably depressed, laying on a bunch of crushed strawberry fig newtons, in full daylight, tired and wishing for a dark corner to nap in. Mary my upstairs neighbor saw him first, unexpectedly, through the tailgate of the truck, and screamed. I forced myself to look but all I could see was the dinosaur-esque tail, so big! and coiled! And viewed through a crack. I almost looked away but didn’t. And then, the opossum ears, so intricate. The tired eyes. And hands.
I learned yesterday that rats and opossums can cohabitate in the same space, raccoons are more aggressive, and the interior wall sounds I’m hearing sound, to the opossum catcher, more like rodents than opossums. I know, information from an opossum catcher could be considered suspect, or something, but this one repeated several times that we must call immediately if we spot an opossum in the trap, as the traps are placed in full sunlight, and sunlight really stresses them out and it’s dangerous if they aren’t retrieved in a few hours. What I didn’t find out yesterday: the release location. So I have no idea where yesterday’s was relocated to. And he or she has not left my mind since, her or his face, so tired, with such big eyes, and a really weird mouth. Also, what happens after relocation? What’s the opossum’s relation to the group? Was it a he or a she? Did it have any babies?
April 27, 2008 * 5:19 pm