We are moving. After living eighteen years in the same house (a record for both myself and my husband), we have sold our home and are packing up all of the “stuff” that we can’t bring ourselves to jettison. To ease the transition, we have taken up residence almost full-time in another part of the state, so there is a familiar place to go from here. But it is still hard to say that final goodbye, and walk away from almost twenty years of familiar habits.
Escrow is the limbo that few comprehend outside of the legal and real estate professions. The period of time after you make your decision to buy or sell a dwelling and before it is official can be tense. What will go wrong, break, explode, leak, or otherwise ruin your plans? So when I discovered some mysterious droppings on the patio, I feared the worst.
“Have you seen the scat out back, those little dark tubes that look almost like seeds?” I asked my husband, the apprehension clutching at my throat. “I hope they aren’t from rats. We just finished our disclosures, and I don’t want to add rats to the list.”
“Oh, I saw those a long time ago, last fall I think. I’m sure they aren’t from rats,” my husband replied without the slightest hint of worry.
But how can you be so sure, I wondered. I began crushing the powdery turds with my shoe and keeping track. One or two showed up every day or so. Certainly not enough for the colony of rodents that I imagined making themselves at home under our house. Whatever happened to those cats that the neighbor feeds, the ones who have been tearing up our yard for years? Now that I needed them, they had moved on to more fertile ground.
My curiosity continued to grow, until I decided to look up droppings on the Internet. Could it be that those innocent, powdery little bloops were produced by something that wouldn’t cancel the sale of my home and plunge me into a nightmare of vexation and pest control? When I found the picture of the monster that had invaded my space and pooped on my patio I laughed out loud. Hah!
Almost a year ago, I posted the image of a creature that had invaded my laundry room. I have only seen it once since then, but now that we are leaving I am sad to say goodbye. The toad in the laundry room pooped on the patio, and made its home near ours. My eyes weren’t opened to its presence until I was scanning the property for anything out of place. Now all I have left of my unknown companion is a few powdery droppings and a faint memory. Sigh.
When You're Bored 