Thursday, October 6, 2011

Fright Comes to the Cumberlands (Pt. 1)

  I'm pretty proud of that pun.

  Back in D.C. after a serious curate's egg of a mini-vaca. The time I got to spend in TN was good, but the reason for said visit couldn't be forgotten. Well, let's talk about that later. Right now, a terrible story.

  So we stayed in Sewanee for a couple of days. The story behind this is too long to go into, but suffice it to say that we live there sometimes. And when we do, we live in the woods. Being a university town, our area is a bastion of liberalism and modernity surrounded by thick forest, small towns, and the cousins your mama warned you about. The region's most famous resident was this guy, which tells you more than I ever could.

  Anyway, after a busy Saturday escorting my grandma, the craft queen celebrity of a certain nameless town, around a crafts festival, we returned to Sewanee for the night. I drifted off into peaceful slumber in my old room, only to be awoken around 4 a.m. by the scritching and pattering of little mice feet. 

  I'm not too creeped out. I've heard mice at night before. It's a log house in the woods -- there's bound to be some kind of animals lurking around it. Plus, how do I know it's not coming from the roof? Annoying, but not something to get out of a warm bed at dawn for.

  I go back to sleep, only to be awoken a few minutes later by even louder scratching. Okay, this is a mite more disturbing. I turn over with a vague thought to investigate... and see a unusual dark spot on the wall. As I mentioned the house is made of wood, so weird patterns and dark spots are everywhere. However, I've been looking at this wall for ten years and I know this is out of place. I know it will be hard to believe to many people reading this, but I actually try to go back to sleep at this point. Not for too long, though; when I look again and the mysterious thing has changed position, I decide it's time to evacuate the premises.

  Bro's old room across the hall: I should be safe here, right? Ohhhhhh false. I slip into an uneasy slumber only to be awoken .5 seconds later to the sound of skittering feet on metal. What fresh hell is this? I look over to see the shadow of a mouse scurrying over the giant crosscut saw my bro has mounted on his wall. 

  You probably have a lot of questions here, none of which I'm qualified to answer.

  Well crap, what now? I'm fine with the idea of sharing a house with mice, but only if they stay in their lairs and out of my sight. I liked Willard, but I don't want to reenact it.

  I drag a pillow and blanket downstairs with me and set up camp on the couch. After a few minutes, stepmom comes in and asks what I'm doing.

  "Mice. Upstairs."

  Stepmom's eyebrows shoot up towards the hairline: she hates critters in the house. She hurries off to alert the authorities, aka my dad, who then descends to the basement and reemerges with a handful of mousetraps. He also brings up his faithful companion of many years, an electric mousetrap he reverently refers to as "Old Sparky".

  While he's down in the basement assembling his arsenal, I try to lay down but am disturbed once again by the sound of tiny claws on metal. I look over at the stairwell and vaguely register that the thing has indeed followed me downstairs. Not only that, but it's clambering all over the air grate and the pictures on the wall. These feats are made possible by the fact that this is no ordinary mouse. This...

   is a squirrel.



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