Surprise Homecoming

Who could guess?

Not much traffic headed home from San Antonio after my vacation in Tucson. Pulled into garage mid-afternoon glad to be home. I took my purse into the house leaving the door ajar and walked slowly to the mailbox. When I came back in, I noticed some debris on the mat in the laundry room. Odd, I thought.

Looking up across the kitchen is when I saw a mess of broken glass under the back windows. What the heck? I walked over to find another mess in the living room, again under the windows. That’s when I realized I might not be alone in the house. My pulse quickened.

In my bedroom other objects were scattered on the floor. That’s when I called for help. “Jane, can you come over? Something has been or is in my house!” Like good friends often do, Jane brought her house mate to investigate. Sleuthing began as we looked for openings to determine how something got into the house. No entry point was found. Flashlights in hand we looked in/over/under furniture but found ‘no one’.

There were puddles of water and urine in several rooms indicating to me that whatever it was hadn’t been inside long enough for the liquids to fully evaporate. I deducted the culprit must have escaped when I left the door open and went to mailbox. I felt relieved that no confrontation had occurred. My panic subsided.

Eventually we noticed that a vent cover under the microwave was laying on the stove. Lois looked up and opened the tall cabinets above the stove to see the flu that was vented onto the roof. That’s when we decided a squirrel must have poked its head under the flu cap and toppled into the proverbial ‘rabbit hole’, landed on my stove, jumped for the lampshade over the kitchen table that was askew, landed, chomped on house plants, and sought a way out going for the windows where things were knocked off the sills.

I envisioned a frantic squirrel, maybe young, looking for an escape hatch. That was the end of the story when my son came to check out the vent on the roof finding no damage. “Must’ve been a small guy,” he said, “because the entry was tiny to allow air flow.”

Waking up refreshed after the mysterious break-in, I went about my day, but the next night I smelled something not quite right. Again, I took another look in and around the room, closet and under the furniture. Finally, I started to pull back the bed covers to discover I had been sleeping with a dead squirrel on the other side of my bed!

Mortified, I heard a vehicle pulling part way into my driveway to turn around. I ran out screaming, “Stop! Can you help me?” The man in the utility truck saw me, pulled over on the side of the road and came to my rescue at the exact moment I needed reinforcement. He saw my panic nodding his head and followed me into the bedroom and removed the little critter who was curled in a fetal position. I was heart-broken for the small animal, but even more disturbed it had been my bedfellow

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