I feel like this space has been nothing but talk about the retaining wall or ‘woe is me I’m stuck at home’. Nothing of interest happens around here. We are boring. Our Friday evenings look something like this: Michael brings me a glass of wine at 4:30 while I am in the middle of watching presentations in Friday Science Club. We order dinner and then get all excited about our Door Dash notifications. I know many of you are already experienced with food delivery apps, but ordering delivery for other than pizza or Chinese food is still a new thing for us. We get really excited about our possibilities. Our food arrives and it is consumed. I drink the whole bottle of wine and then go to bed at 10:00.

I am not a party animal.

If I had to pick an actually animal to represent a party animal, I think I would chose the opossum. Except I imagine that their parties are very much more banjo moonshine and less fancy Thai and a smooth Malbec. The opossum is the group of Frat boys out on Spring Break, drunkenly wandering down a street trying to find their hotel. They are the kind of drunk that when one spots a slice of pizza in the garbage, they all dive in and fight over it. You know that drunk. Opossums have a definite drunk walk and I’ve seen a number of garbage cans with an opossum inside snacking on a greasy banana peel. Look. I know they’re good for the environment and eat the bugs that drive us crazy, but they still give me the creeps with their beady eyes and long snout with horrible British teeth.

I woke up around 4 AM on day last week. My head was pounding and I got up to take some aspirin and use the bathroom. Josephine went outside during this time and when I came out of the bathroom, I could hear her barking in the back yard. I tapped on the kitchen window. This usually works. She hears the tapping and comes right on in, but this time the tapping at the window was not getting her attention. I put on some shoes and opened the back door. I could just barely see Josephine. She was furiously barking and running from one side of the chicken pen to the other. I hesitated in the doorway and thought “crap…there’s something in the chicken pen that is not supposed to be in the chicken pen.” This is the moment I go out in the dark and either discover a cute alien like E.T. or the horrifying Alien that wants to lay it’s eggs inside of me.

The first thing I do is go out and grab Josephine. As I lean down to pick her up, I can see a small furry white opossum inside the pen. Josephine has become this hard statue of herself; she is so furious. I walk Josephine back to the house so I can put her some where safe and grab our claw that Michael uses to pick up the dead that Albus brings home. Wait…did I say we’re boring? I go back out to the chicken pen and I don’t see him. I thought “Yay! he got out!”, but then I look over and see that he has climbed up the side of the pen about level with my face. He’s just hanging there, looking at me and hissing. Then I try to grab him with the claw, but he just slips right out of the claw every time. So I go back inside and wake up Michael who stumbles out into the dark with me. So now both of us are out there chasing this baby opossum around the chicken pen. Every time the opossum turns to hiss at us, we jump back a little. Finally, the little guy squeezed out of the pen probably the same way he squeezed into it. There’s a tiny gap between the ground and bottom of the pen in the back just big enough for something his size to squeeze through.

We checked on the chickens. They seemed oblivious. Foghorn was sleeping on top of eggs in the nesting box, so we know the opossum didn’t get any eggs. The chickens are at least three times his size, so we know he didn’t get any of the chickens. He probably squeezed himself into the pen to drink some water and eat some chicken feed. Once he filled up on water and food, he probably just fell asleep inside the pen. Just like a drunk Frat boy. I’m sure Josephine scared the bejeebus out of him. Good girl.

Note that I do not have a picture of that baby opossum. I was not thinking clearly enough at four o’clock in the morning to grab my camera. You’ll just have to trust me when I say that this baby opossum was actually kind of cute. Despite his hairless tail.