I had a little mis-adventure while mowing my parents yard this morning. More later.
Now on with the mis-adventure. I was just wrapping up the south-west quadrant of the front yard (a half acre by itself) when I saw my mother standing at one of the three front doors of the house frantically waving her arms over her head in an effort to get my attention. Well, it worked. I stopped the tractor and went down to see what was the matter. That's when she told me there was a critter in the house. I asked her what type of critter and she said it was a possum. At that point I knew I had a fight on my hands. Those things are
NASTY with a capitol 'N'! First item of business was to get something to trap it in. An old four gallon galvanized bucket that we use to catch rain water from the roof immediately sprang to mind. I got it then had her show me where the possum was. It was in the library. Great! That gave it a thirty foot long section of wall that was nothing but shelves and pigeon holes, a couple hundred places to hide. There are countless odds and ends along the wall and a heavy flat-screen TV right in the middle. Guess what the possum was behind. That's right, the TV. The one thing in the room that couldn't be moved by myself or my mother. While she locked the dogs (three of them) in a bedroom I set about reducing the number of possible hiding places for the possum. After a little while I had it trapped in a ten foot long space in which it could only move along the wall behind the TV, and there was nothing for it to climb. I set the bucket on it's side at the south end then started poking at the possum with my walking stick. It immediately turned and went the wrong way, north, toward the end that my mother was at. She used an old bamboo umbrella (don't ask me how old it is, I just know it's older than I am) to whack it gently on the nose and turn it in the other direction. I then poked at it several more times with my walking stick. Eventually it was desperately seeking a way out and I provided it. I moved aside a heavy stamp album that was blocking the south end. The possum ran through the hole and ran smack into the bucket. I quickly tipped it upright and slammed a square of tin down over it. I quickly tied the tin down and carried the bucket out to the tractor and took it a quarter mile down the road to an abandoned boat launch. There I released the possum. It ran out of the bucket, turned and glared at me, hissed, then ran off into the woods. I went back, returned the bucket to it's original location then finished mowing the yard. My mother decided that possum catching was above and beyond the call of duty and took me to lunch at the restaurant of my choice after I finished the yard and got cleaned up. That thing bit my walking stick at one point and left some pretty deep teeth marks in it. And just to keep this model railroad related, the library in my parent's home used to be a two car garage in 1970, in which the HO/OO layout that I got in Germany as a Christmas present in 1966 was set up.
