Possum Piñata

     In his early twenties, my husband began renovating a house his grandfather had purchased for two mules and a wagon in the 1940s.  It was the kind of house realtors call a “fixer-upper.” Nestled in a beautiful, wooded valley a short walk from the White River, the home had everything you could hope for in location but severely lacked in other niceties people expect out of their humble abodes, like insulation, decent window screens, or air conditioning. 

A view like this makes air conditioning
seem less important.

     One hot summer night he was awoken from sleep in his sweltering bedroom because of a strange sound coming from the kitchen.  He went in to investigate and discovered a possum sitting on his dinner table eating his light bread.  It was the kind in the package with the little girl on the front.  Sunbeam Giant; his favorite kind.  The possum had chewed a hole in the plastic and had his head burrowed deep into the bread bag when Kelly walked in and flipped on the light switch.

     It’s something of a surprise to find wildlife in your home.  How had it gotten in?  Did he have a heretofore-undiscovered roommate?  Then he noticed that the screen in the kitchen, which had only been tacked onto the frame with little nails, was askew, and the possum’s path into the home had been discovered.

     If your only interactions with possums have occurred as you drove down the highway and saw Mr. Opossum lying squished on the road, then you might think possums just aren’t that scary.  You might think that finding one on your kitchen table eating your light bread would be no. big. deal.  Possums are known for ‘playing possum’, and some people might think this one would have just fallen over and played dead. You might think you could pick its seemingly lifeless body up off the table where it had fainted clean away and gently place it outside in its natural habitat.   

A possum acting like decent possums should act

     You might be wrong.  Possums have a mouthful of razor-sharp needlelike teeth, and they hiss when in danger.  This particular possum was more interested in playing mountain lion than possum, and it lifted its head, bared its teeth, and hissed at Kelly.  Getting a possum out of your home is something that can only handled by the manliest of men, and fortunately, my husband ranks at the top of that list.  In a feat of courage not possible for an ordinary man, he was able to get the possum out of his house without harming either himself or the possum, and he fixed the window screen.  The only major loss was the light bread.

     Kelly forgot about the possum incident in the way that manly men do and went back to bed.  The next night when he went back to the kitchen in the inky darkness to get a drink of water, the possum was not on his mind. It’s important here for you to know that Kelly was au naturel, in the buff, nekkid, and you don’t make judgments about that because you know you would do it too if your house was a thousand degrees in the hot summertime; besides, it was pitch black, and there was no one around to see him.

     He headed to the sink, enjoying the gentle breeze through his avenue, when the unthinkable happened.  As he neared the counter, Kelly suddenly felt a searing pain flash through his nether region.  It came to him in a flash that the possum had somehow made its way back into his home, had this time been perched on the countertop, and had now reared up and sank its teeth into the most precious part of any man’s anatomy.

     As pain washed through Kelly’s body, he knew he couldn’t go down without a fight.  I like to think that his subconscious mind knew he had more children to father and was by golly not going to give up the possibility of having those kids.

     He curled his massive hands into even more massive fists and began punching the possum as hard as he could.  Over and over, he pounded those fists into the marsupial attached to his anatomy in a futile effort to free himself from its razor grip.  With each pound, it seemed the possum only ground its teeth into him with more ferocity, and the future of the Hatman Clan was dangling in the balance.  In the midst of the onslaught against the toothy critter, a small tendril of thought floated through Kelly’s mind that something was not right.  In his fear and pain-stricken mind, it was hard to think straight, but something was wrong about the situation other than having ten pounds of needle teeth and claws hanging from your undercarriage. 

     It hit him in a moment of perfect clarity.  It was no possum.  As he’d neared the sink to get his glass of water, he’d brushed against the countertop which had one of those old-fashioned metal bands that had buckled and warped over the years surrounding the edge, and his precious bits had gotten caught between the band and counter edge.  As the pinching began, and because of the prior possum incident, he assumed what any thinking man would assume and had gone on an offensive against the… countertop.  He had been whaling the fire out of that countertop, which was only causing the band to pinch him harder, which was causing him to hit harder… Well, you see how that vicious cycle was playing out. 

The hidden kitchen danger you never see on any list

     He managed to calm down enough to carefully extricate himself from the countertop and band.  His knuckles were bloody and other portions of his body had suffered damage too.  The pain eventually went away, and, much to Kelly’s chagrin, so did the swelling.  The possum never turned up again inside the house; it turned out he had fixed the window screen the first little sucker had gotten through after all.

     The lasting effects?  None, except a good story that can be a little hard to tell in polite company. 

If things had played out differently,
this picture might have never happened.