Hello there

My husband is of the mindset that if things are going to happen, they will happen. For example, when I suggest we have an expert out to check the safety of our house and yard, he rolls his eyes and tells me that if a burglar wants in our house, nothing will deter him from getting in.

I am of the mindset that taking precautions to prevent things from happening is a worthwhile endeavor. Bring on the expert! I'm the one who makes sure the doors are locked each night. The one who doesn't leave my car unlocked in the driveway. More importantly, I do not leave my house unattended with my front door or my garage wide open.

Friday, I came home to both of those things. The husband was out walking the dog.

Him: "We were at the end of the street."

Whatever. I parked my van in the garage, and then I closed the door. Later that night, before I went to bed, I went to check that it was still closed. Because many times the husband will open it and forget that he did so.

It was 12:30 a.m., and everyone was asleep. I made my way through the kitchen to the door leading into the laundry area slash garage. Opening the door, I turned on the lights and took two steps into what is my laundry area, a small slab of concrete one step up from the garage. It houses my washing machine, my utility sink, a clothes rack, shelving, and the water heater. My dryer is not on the slab, but it is still right there butt up against the front of my van.

As I entered, I stopped because standing in my laundry area, on the step above my dryer, about two feet from me, stood a creature on four legs. The beast froze like I did, and we stared at one another.

It was one of those moments where the brain signals something is amiss, but it hasn't quite computed why that is or what that is. I vaguely remember thinking cute animal, then rat, then I discounted that notion because of the white muzzle and dark eyes. In the time it took my brain to register all of that, said animal's brain computed DANGER or HUMAN more quickly, and it moved first. Thankfully, in the opposite direction. I'm not sure what I would've done had he (or she) moved toward me.

I too turned tail and hopped back into the house, shutting and barring the door from the creature that I considered a baby raccoon before computing what I had seen was a baby opossum.

OMG! I had come face to face with an opossum and lived to tell the story.

I then wished I had gotten a picture for a blog entry. After that, though, came the worry. What to do? What to do? I worried that someone, mainly the husband or the daughter home from college, would open the door and let in the opossum who would then wreak havoc throughout my house and pass on rabies or some such disease to my dog, or worse, me. I solved the problem with a note on the door to use caution in opening it because a baby opossum was visiting.

Needless to say, I didn't sleep well.

Tom: "Why didn't you just open the garage door and let him out?"

Me: "It was after midnight. I couldn't go to bed with the garage door opened."

Tom: "He would've run out if you'd opened the door, and then you would've closed it."

Me: "Seriously? Are you the opossum whisperer now? How long would that have taken? Five minutes? Ten? And how would I have known he left?"

Annoyed that this was the way his day was starting, Tom went out into the garage and searched for the opossum. I helped him, giving excellent suggestions like moving the van outside for better searching. He kept insisting that he heard the creature, but he couldn't find it. I then released the hound.

Who immediately trotted into the garage, sniffed, and made a bee-line for an area by Tom's workbench. He smelled and sniffed, and eventually, Tom discovered the baby opossum had trapped himself in a small trash can sitting along the wall of our garage.

We released him into the wild (over the hedge into my neighbor's yard), but not before I took a picture.

Tom: "Are you serious?"

Me: "I am. It's all about the blog, baby."