“I didn’t know you had a stuffed mouse,” said the little neighbor girl. “I don’t,” replied my daughter.
A moment later, I was bounding up the stairs to calls of “MOMMY!” and “It moved!” Upon entering my daughter’s pink bedroom, there it was: a somewhat bloodied (and quite alive) field mouse sitting on top of a teddy bear’s head. Apparently, our cat had caught it and hadn’t quite finished the job.
Everyone has a wild-animal-in-the-house story. Some of them are positively legendary. Over the years in our house, we’ve had mice as well as several bats, two bees’ nests and a bird, and I thought that was bad enough. But then I asked on social media for other people’s stories, and I was not fully prepared for the delight.
There was the Dobermann who laid a possum right on the kitchen counter as a present for its owners. There was the Alaskan moose who tried to follow a human through a door and got his antlers stuck in the doorway as they tried to shut him out. There were stories of crazed squirrels, chipmunks, tarantulas and snakes — even a baby mamba snake that fell out of the oven. Luckily, that was in Uganda, a safe 7,000 miles from me.
Then there was my local friend who had a mama and baby raccoons living in her unused stove vent chimney. Because she was too softhearted to evict baby animals, for five weeks they listened to raccoon noises while they ate breakfast. A neighbor tells the hilarious story of finding a snake in the second-floor toilet at her old house decades ago. At another friend’s house, an enormous barred owl somehow got into the basement and wreaked havoc before keeling over and dying. My husband had a chipmunk running through his kitchen when he was a kid, and a friend had an attic invaded by a family of flying squirrels. Even in newer houses, nature fights its way in.
I have to admit, until I asked for stories, I was feeling a little sheepish about the fact that my kids think it’s totally normal to hear unidentified skittering noises in the walls — or even the unmistakable thunk and roll of an acorn falling down behind the plaster. Oh, dear. This isn’t normal, but it’s a 101-year-old house. What can you do?
It’s not as if we like being under siege by the animal world. We’ve called exterminators and wildlife experts. We keep the roof fixed. We’ve tried to plug up the teeny, tiny entry holes. We keep the chimney capped. We’ve even had a one-way “bat baffle” installed so bats could leave from a possible entry point and not get back in. Mostly, things are quiet. But nature, as it tends to, keeps battling to come inside.
Keeping ourselves and families safe is a primal instinct, and one we’re all having a hard time grappling with lately — because it’s simply become more impossible to do it perfectly. Floods, fires, hurricanes, a deadly pandemic. Lately, they’re all too real. We count on our homes to be unbreachable places that keep out the bad and uncomfortable things, but we can only do so much. It’s an uneasy peace we’re seeking, wanting to do whatever we can do to shut out danger, illness and tragedy, and all at once accepting that we have to be OK with some amount of failure in that fight.
How do we live like this? I’m not sure, exactly, but I know that we come to accept a lot of hardships, even as we fight them. We are breakable, and maybe it’s time to finally admit that perfection was never possible — not for any part of life. We put children in car seats and cut their grapes in half, but we also hold our breath when they climb to the top of the playground equipment, when we hand the car keys to them, when they seem to be making exactly the mistake we hoped they wouldn’t. We go on living — and even finding joy — while we struggle with chronic illness, disability, mental health issues, chemo, grief, you name it. We are both fragile and strong, all mixed up in a life-recipe we might never have written for ourselves.
I think we love stories about wild animals getting inside because sharing them gets at that need of ours to sometimes look around and say, “Can you believe this? Life is crazy.” At least with animals, it’s nearly always harmless and funny in the end, even if it’s gross or scary while it’s happening.
In retrospect, it’s hilariously ridiculous that my family stayed in a rickety Maine vacation rental that was invaded by crumb-seeking squirrels banging around the kitchen every day — every day — at 5 a.m. In retrospect, it’s absurdly amusing that my brother awoke one morning to find one of those little squirrels sitting placidly on his chest.
I mean, what can you do, right? We control what we can. We accept what we can’t. And, hopefully, we remember to try to laugh along the way.
