Oh, rats!

One night a couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in bed, playing Scrabble, enjoying the relative quiet, being happily lulled into a false sense of sanctuary. This utopia was swiftly brought to an abrupt death with an ear-splitting shriek emanating from the living room, directly below me. Recognizing it as the daughter who is tough enough to beat the brains out of her brothers, but wails at the sight of a worm, I boogied downstairs to take a gander at what I just knew was going to be an amusing situation. Sure enough, recoiled onto the back of the sofa like a cornered cat, my oh-so-tough 15-year-old daughter was panting, wide-eyed, and pointing to the television set. Now, I'm accustomed to the wide-eyed pointing at the television (pretty... shiny... mindless entertainment), but the panting was new, as was her choice of seating arrangement. She manages to tell us (the rest of the family wanted a piece of this action, too, apparently) that she's just seen a rat bigger than she knew existed (she even stared at if for a few seconds, thinking it was one of the ferrets loose from its cage). So we proceed with a search of the entertainment center (a built-in, pain-in-the-ass, piece of cabinetry). No rats, but we did find the source of attractiveness; three pouches of cat treats in the back corner of a shelf, shredded & chewed & mangled. She tells us that it was enormous and brown and very cute (thus the blood-curdling banshee imitation, right?).

Over the next few nights, she (being the one who is addicted to the television like crack cocaine) hears & glimpses a pair of rats several more times. Not once did the rodents stick around for the rest of us to see (well, once I saw a tail beating a hasty retreat in the back of the cat-treat shelf).

Fast forward to today. I'm making our traditional Sunday breakfast of gingerbread pancakes, and teenaged son comes in from the back yard. "Mom, Madison said those rats were huge, but she didn't tell us they were that huge," pointing poolside.

"You saw one?" I'm immediately wary. In two weeks those things could have grown to the size of our dachshund.

"Um, yeah. Marshmallow drowned it." Gross!

So I peek outside, and sure enough, there on the concrete, looking like a drowned rat (wait, it was a drowned rat)... was a rat of epic proportions. It was, far and away, the largest one I'd ever seen: a good 12 inches tip-to-tail.

I sent Mark outside to do body retrieval duty (only because I was cooking breakfast and couldn't leave... right?). When he came back inside, I asked, "Pretty impressive, eh?"

"Meh. I've seen bigger."

"What?!?! No you haven't! Where?!?"

"The Amazing Race." Where the rats to which he refers looked like this:

I rest my case.

Comments

[Vanessa]

EEEK! Actually, in that photo it looks pretty darn cute. But I'd probably be right up on the kitchen table in half a second if I saw it in front of me. Something about rats in the house, as opposed to outdoors, totally creeps me out for some reason, despite my love for all animals.

[Lori V.]

You said it, Vanessa! But once they reach the size of those Gambian pouched rats, they are more like cats or dogs, so I think I could actually have one of those... maybe... :-)

[karrie]

When I first moved to Boston, I lived in a high-rise in a rough part of the city. My apartment was at the end of a hallway near a garbage chute. I put my key in the door, walked in and an enormous rat ran right over the top of my Timberland boot. (Where I worked at the time.) I was so incredibly thankful for those boots!

That happened 12 years ago and I shuddered writing about it.