Hello, Maintenance? I Need Pest Control

When my husband and I first got married, we lived in the 1400 square foot top floor apartment of his ex-girlfriend’s parent’s house. He was living there when we met and after eloping I moved in, too. Never mind that our bedroom was directly over his Ex’s and my husband would end up hushing my sounds of passion but that is a story best left unwritten. Anyway, one night while he was at work (he was a second-shifter) I kept hearing the sound of an animal in the attic. It would run back and forth its scurrying like that scared me. Why was it so frantic? Did it need to get out? Could it get out? How would it get out? I stayed up until Jeff came home and told him about it, but he kind of dismissed my concern.

Well, this went on for a couple more nights, but I told myself there was nothing to worry about and eventually … it might go away? Then after about a week and half, I no longer noticed the sounds so much. Until. Until the evening I was walking from the bedroom to the kitchen, you know, just living the Dream, and I heard gnawing coming from above in the hallway. I was definitely not liking the sound of that. I looked up after about an hour and saw a little hole appearing. Uh, oh. I watched that tiny little hole become bigger by the hour until finally true panic set in and I rushed to the phone and screamed at the Operator to go get my husband, this was an emergency! Usually in factories, employees are only allowed to take emergency phone calls if the person’s house was on fire and there I was screaming that something was eating a hole in the ceiling and I needed him to come home RIGHT NOW! The Operator said she would give him my message.

I promptly ran into the bedroom and closed the door tight.

My husband came home at the usual time and I am locked in the bedroom, sitting on the bed with the covers pulled up to my chin. “Did you see that??? There’s a squirrel up there and he stuck his head out of that hole and looked right at me!!!!!”

Thus began my long torment from all squirrels. I have since discovered them in my fireplace at my house in Indiana – sitting there inside, completely trapped because the screen was tightly closed and they could not escape vertically. I have had them run across the roof many, many times. Apparently the only way to enter the house was through the fireplace.

Their attraction to me is highly established. So, I was not even surprised this past weekend when I discovered a squirrel running around in my townhouse at the community I manage. Turns out, you shouldn’t leave your front door open when you are bringing in your groceries if you also happen to have four large trees right outside your front door. I was amazed that I was so calm. Other than a slight quickening of my pulse, I was really pulled together. I watched poor Henry, as I came to call him, bump repeatedly into the sliding glass door and I could imagine he was just cussing me as he tried to figure out why he could not get to the great Outdoors (because it was obviously there! He could see it.) When I realized he was panicked and I was not, I managed to open the door to the slider but Henry ran underneath the couch. I could see his fuzzy squirrel tail all peaking out. So I tried to open the front door, but then he ran there before I could get there and I inadvertently scared him again. Eventually though he figured out how to go and escaped the torture of the confinement in the Townhouse. Good grief. I hope the next animal that decides to adopt me is a cute dog because a dog is what I have been searching for since mine passed away.