Critters In My Bedroom

Pam Schmieding

Critters in my Bedroom

Every cat has a unique personality. Gracie, a Bengal, has personality in spades. She has a wild side. It's in her genes. As a teenage cat, she'd come up behind my head while I was seated or lying down in bed, and chew on the hair right at the crown. It felt like she was pulling two or three strands out at a time. She'd wrap her paws around my head, one paw on each side, and hold my head so I couldn’t get away. It was an odd sensation.

One night after Dan and I had gone to bed and just drifted off to sleep, I felt that same sensation on the crown of my head. Gracie! How'd she get out of the laundry room? Since she hogs the bed, she sleeps in the laundry room at night. But it seems clever ol' Grace had learned to open the door for a midnight snack.

I lifted up on one elbow to grab Gracie and looked at the head of my bed. A small, pinched, beady-eyed face looked back at me from a distance of only 6 inches. Damn! That's not Gracie!

I sprang out of bed yelling, "Dan! Turn on the light! DAN! There's a face behind the bed." My husband, still mostly asleep resisted doing anything. I, in the meantime continued to yell about the face behind the bed while pointing in the last known location of the face.

"What face? What...are you dreaming? Umf..whaaa", he mumbled on. His confusion would've been comical under different circumstances. Right now, it seemed that hours went by in seconds, and that face was still unapprehended. I raced to the laundry room to fetch Gracie. Surely this wild cat would take on The Face and deliver me. Aggravatingly, Gracie, too, was a sleepy lump. To her credit, she caught on faster than Mister Master that Mistress Master was wound up.

Dan was painstakingly slow turning on his bedside lamp under the direction of his deranged wife. Gracie and I stood at the foot of the king-size bed and slowly peered around my side to see what there was to see. At the very same moment, the teensy, flesh colored face leaned from the head of the bed to see what the heck was making all the noise in the middle of the night. We all (that is Gracie, the critter, and I--since Dan was still not out of bed!) shrieked and ran for it. Gracie, now growling a low slow growl, and I bolted for the upstairs bedroom furthest from that spot, while the critter ducked back behind the relative safety of the bed.

I dove for the upstairs with the cat in my arms. She was only too happy to be leaving the area. We shoved ourselves under the comforter and were immediately joined my now fully awake husband who screamed, "What the hell was that!" Since my heart rate didn't allow for much more breath and speaking than the bare minimum, I replied in clipped tones, "I don't know, just get rid of it!" Nearly the entire living contents of the house (not counting flora) were now hyperventilating in a small upstairs’ bedroom. Dan sucked it up and went hunting. In his absence, Gracie and I concentrated on returning our vital signs to some semblance of normalcy.

In what seemed like 30 or 40 minutes, Dan came into the room and proudly announced that he’d solved the mystery. It turned out the critter was a baby opossum looking for a place to climb up and be snuggly. He assured me that it had been removed, and that it was once again safe to get back in my own bed. Oh, I don't think so, buddy, I harrumphed. I needed details! I'm not going back willy-nilly into the Pit of Critterdom until satisfied that little junior wasn't going to attempt another climb into my surrogate hair!

Dan relayed the tale of locating the hapless critter on its hurried (for a opossum) way back out the front door from whence he evidently came. It was making its break for it when Dan got his large, man-sized salmon fishing net and attempted several scooping motions to nab the little guy. The baby opossum, finally captured, was then gently dumped into the bordering flowerbed in hopes of joining back up with its own family group. At least that was the intention that night.

Two years later, Dan confessed that the wayward opossum had come back the very next night for another nocturnal stroll. Without letting me know (I don't know if Gracie ever knew either) he utilized the fishing net once again. Now with some experience and practice, he scooped up the dense creature, ran across the street to the neighbor's yard, and in the best tradition and form of a javelin thrower at Hayward Field, chucked the opossum over their fence. He said with chagrin that if the number of bounces were some sort of indication, we’d not see the likes of him again!

To my knowledge, we've been opossum free ever since.