It started as a scritching in the wall of my bedroom in that primitive apartment on S. 76th Ave., which I dismissed in the beginning as a tree branch dragging across my window. I was working the midnight shift in those days at my current job, and the sun light streaming into my 90+ degree bedroom was hard enough to try to sleep through without this annoying scritch-scritch making my life difficult. It would stop after a few minutes, and just as i was finally dropping over the edge of sleep, it would come again. Scritch. Scritchscritchscritchscritch. Silence. This couldn't be a tree branch.
Over the course of the next couple of weeks, the scritching became more or less continuous. It now sounded like i had a family of huge mice (I had to think to myself "huge mice", because "rats" made me want to run screaming from the place never to return) living in my bedroom wall. The scritching gave way to gnawing noises, and occasional tussels punctuated by injured animal noises were becoming a regular thing. If i pounded on the wall, they would stop making noise for a couple of hours, but eventually this ceased to faze them at all and they would carry on regardless of how much i pounded and yelled. I took to trying to sleep on the couch during the day, but my couch was nothing more than a two-recliner loveseat that even I am too short to comfortably lay on for very long. Uncomfortable couch or sharing a bedroom with a family of some variety of rodent were the only two choices i had at the time. My step kids had a bunk bed in the other room, but for some reason i just didn't feel right sleeping in either of their beds, so i returned to my own room, unaware of the surprised that awaited me there.
I walked into the room to see a dark spot on the wall that hadn't been there before. It was a hole. So the bastards had finally broken through, i thought, as a tiny head poked through the wall, and after seeing me, withdrew back into the safety of its lair.
That was a squirrel head!
I had squirrels living in my wall! I was both relieved that it wasn't rats after all, and exceedingly annoyed at the undisputable evidence that there were indeed rodents living in my wall. With the last vestiges of my denial dispelled, I took a folding TV tray and propped it up against the hole in the wall so that they couldn't come through while i slept, then laid down to make the huge effort it now took to sleep through all that scritching, scratching, gnawing, fighting and general ruckus the squirrels relentlessly engaged in.
Over the course of the next few months, the squirrels broke through the wall in numerous places. The whole wall underneath the window was rapidly on its way to becoming one big patch kit. I would come home sometimes to find nothing wrong with the wall, and sometimes i would come home to several more holes in the same day. Snow and rain came through the holes into my room. We'd called the landlord several times, and though he did his best to make repairs and keep them out, they always returned. The last thing i wanted to do was lay poison in there, have them die in the walls, and cause a stench. I thought the noise and wall breaches would be easier to live with than the smell of decaying rodent, though not by much.
One afternoon after i'd finally gotten to sleep, i thought i felt something gently land on the foot of my bed. I'm a pretty light sleeper. I sometimes dream so vividly that it wasn't unusual for me to be asleep and dreaming, thinking i was awake. I ignored the gentle landing as i'd ignored so many other times when my dreams startled me awake. Then the darting movements began, and i opened my eyes to see the thing i'd been dreading over the course of the last year or so: a squirrel frozen in mid step on the foot of my bed, contemplating me with its beady black little eyes and walking on me with its dirty, potentially rabid little paws. I screamed before i could bite it off, and the squirrel leapt for the portal to sanctuary, the bushy tail disappearing behind it with a little flourish. I shakily gathered my blanket and pillow and went to sleep in Ryan's room.
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