Day 4: Part 2

Yesterday, Day 4, really required two posts.

Snuggling in bed with Bry, just about to roll over to sleep, we hear a scream from downstairs...April screaming and calling for Bryan while running up the stairs panicking. She had looked at her clock in the night and there, illuminated by the red glow of the time, was a rat, whiskers and all. She leaped out of bed, screaming, turned on the light and ran. 

Enter hero brother Bryan and his trusty sidekick wifey who thankfully grew up on a farm and knows rats are usually scaredy-cats, unless rabid...ugh.

Our plan: dress in protective clothing, find net and towel with which to capture said rat, open door, enter room, find the trembling thing and throw it outside. Done.

Then we looked into April’s room…wow did that little rat had plenty of places to hide and survive.

Side note:  April had moved home after living in a townhouse, intending to move out again in a couple months; but, given the housing market issues and complications, months turned into years, a true ‘unpacking’ never took place and her room was more of a latent storage system where she never spends time except to sleep.

After tiptoeing around the piles of stuff and randomly shaking this or that, we realized that finding the little guy was going to be tricky. Off to Walmart goes Bryan to find some traps; I begin to dig. In the back of both our minds is the fact that we planned to leave on a roadtrip early the next morning but instead it’s midnight and we are looking for a creepy-face rodent.

April, with a racing heart, stood in the hallway while I began to excavate the piles, shaking carefully before handing it to her to stow in the hallway or elsewhere. Stacks of beautiful books, design magazines, paper logo-ed bags filled with whatever merchandise came in them, stashed for a day of use that hasn’t arrived yet, a padded eye cover that she’d been looking for for 3 years, cases of wine, each gathered from her travels,  clothes, clothes…clothes. I think this is called sister-in-law bonding. But even after the mattress was lifted and Bryan looked under the cabinets with a light…no rat.

By this time, April had basically moved into the upstairs empty bedroom, accepting that she would never again enter her old room. We trooped back to bed, rat trap set, and a number of our guy friend who lives nearby on speed dial in case ratty shows his face, or his dead body, while we were away.

To be continued, if we ever discover what became of the nasty creature.