My Mother's House

Last Fall, my mom had a raccoon outbreak. A raccoon (she suspected it was two of them appearing at different times) suddenly appeared in her kitchen from a hole no one knew about in the pantry. At first she was willing to work with it. Mostly it was there for Grey Kitty's cat food. The raccoon would raid the dry food dish, taking cat food and rinsing the pieces in the water dish, leaving a soggy floating mess in their wake.

She would put Grey Kitty's bowl of dry food on the kitchen table to hide it, but the raccoon would climb on the table to get to it. She accepted this, too. She told me about combing her hair and watching television in the living room and getting up to get a snack in the kitchen. As she walked into the kitchen, there the raccoon would be, on top of the kitchen table. It would watch her without moving, until she returned to the living room, then it would go back to eating. Later when she returned to the kitchen, it would be gone, leaving behind its calling card of the mess in the water bowl. Sometimes when she came into the kitchen to make dinner, it would be sitting on one of the chairs at the dining room table. As she fixed dinner it watched her from under the table, still sitting in the chair.

Others in the household were not as zen-like about the visitor. Grey Kitty would avoid the issue all together. He'd pretended there wasn't a raccoon on the table eating his food and just walk on by. My younger sister Chrystal would scream when she saw them and run from the room. My mom's husband Leon wasn't at all pleased with the new guests and wanted them gone. They tried to shut the pantry door, but then it seemed to be coming in from a hole a plumber had left in the bathroom floor.

This went on for a few weeks, until one day, for some reason, the raccoon became a vandal. My mom would wake up the next morning to find it had pulled cereal boxes down off the shelves, torn them open and dumped their contents all over the floor. It marauded through the kitchen while they slept, shredding apart anything plastic, including medication bottles, and throwing the contents about the room. It was then the raccoon had to go. Her solution was reasonable: she simply got a humane trap for it, caught it, and set it free in the woods far from her house.

When I visit her, the room I stay in is the back room of the house. At night (and often during the day), you can hear squirrels that live somewhere inside the roof and inside the walls. They scamper loudly all across the ceiling, sounding like they are actually in the room with you. They've even appeared inside the house, freaked out and hostile, on occasion.

Another thing about the house is the electricity. It's an old house, and the wiring has never been updated. One time when I came for a visit, as I was putting my bags away in the back room, I noticed a handwritten sign above a light switch by the door that said "Do not turn off". Curiosity overcame me, and I turned it off. Dramatically, all the electricity groaned to a halt in the entire house. My mom had to call the electric company to turn the power back on. Turns out an old friend had installed a ceiling fan in that room, but once the fan was in, the switch that turned it on and off now shuts off all the power. (That light switch is now duck taped in the on position looking like a silver cocoon against the wall.

In the back room I stay in, there are two outlets. On one wall by the television, the bottom socket doesn't work. I found that out the hard way during a visit when I plugged something into it. The outlet made a loud popping sound and a bright flash of light. Now most all the appliances for this room are plugged into two piggy-backed extension cords that stretch across the kitchen floor from behind the stove and across the back room.

One visit, as I was showering there, when I touched the hot water faucet, I could feel it vibrating with electricity. Not enough to hurt, but enough to give that creepy electrified feeling. Of course I told my mom about it, but like her philosophy with the raccoons (before they became delinquents), my mom felt that as long as it wasn't hurting anyone, it isn't worth all the fuss I was making about it.


My mom and Grey Kitty



The reason I'm writing about my mom's house is because tomorrow I am going to Kentucky to visit her. I love visiting her, and I love that house. To be there is like a totally different world. And now, in the summer, if you sit in the back yard after dusk swatting at the cloud of mosquitoes surrounding you, you can see something that fills me with such unreasonable joy that I can't even describe. Just as the sun is setting, the fireflies come out. They rise from the grass, winking yellow-green, rising to the trees. In a good year, they are so plentiful that it looks like the trees have been hung with thousands of tiny winking lights. Everywhere you look the earth is sparkling. And I can't imagine anything more beautiful than to stand in that tropical humidity, toes deep in emerald grass, surrounded by little winking stars in every direction.