Even at my age!
The weather is deliciously warm today, with a high in the 60s. There’s not a cloud in the sky- a perfect spring Hoosier day, albeit somewhat early.
Too bad it had to be ruined.
After my husband left to run errands this afternoon, I let the pup into the back yard and pulled down the screen on the storm door. Why not blow the stink out, as an old friend used to say? The cool breeze fanned my hair, and I gazed through the mesh, dreaming of the gardening and hammocking days ahead.
Our power had gone out, but that was no problem. I sat at the family room table and called my mom for a brief catch-up. No, I didn’t know when the power would return, I told her. But there were a few things I could do anyway. As we chatted, a row of empty milk jugs awaiting the last of the winter sowing caught my eye. Maybe I could finish that project by myself and without power, I mused to her. My husband and I had worked together on the first round, he doing the cutting and transporting to the garden and me filling them with potting soil and seeds, since I tend to draw blood any time a knife is required. But I could work carefully in the kitchen light and then take them outside myself using a cookie sheet. Mom wished me well, and we hung up.
As I sat considering the equipment I would need to find in the dark garage, my eyes glanced back to the screen door. Something strange caught my eye. What WAS that?
High up on the left side of the heavy door’s jamb, between it and the storm door, a blackish outline appeared. I walked closer and stared. How odd! Could it be some kind of mildew? My mind ran to the outdoor furniture cleaning advertisement I’d seen on Facebook yesterday.
No, this shape looked like something I should recognize. I leaned a bit closer. Ewww! Were those legs? Four of them, and all splayed in different directions?
I shrank back in horror.
A frog or toad had been smashed between the hinged edge of the door and its frame!
And now it was a withered, flattened mess! Head-high in our doorway!
It must’ve been hanging there all winter to be so flat and desiccated.
Eeeeewwwww!
I slammed the big door shut. How could I have been so close to that thing when I let the dog out? It was right over my shoulder! And it probably had been stuck there every single day I’d let her out for the past several months! Who killed it? How long had that thing been freezing and drying over and over during our fickle winter weather?
I sat shuddering and pondered my options:
Leave the dog out and sit and fret
Find a book to read near a window and just wait until my husband gets home
Do the winter sowing, suck it up and take the milk jugs outside, but avert my eyes- I mean, after all, the disgusting thing was dead, and not likely to fall or jump on me.
My shivering stopped, but my frown of revulsion lingered. I knew the adult thing to do. Could I manage it?
I’m proud to say that I sucked it up. At least partially. I did finish the milk jug planting. But there was no way I was going to get a putty knife and scrape that creepy, crusty thing off the door jamb. No, my husband would have to do that.
I hate frogs. I hate bats, and I hate mice.
Sadly, I have a history of relying on others to handle such situations, but at least I took a small step this time!
Once, as young teenagers babysitting for the neighbors who lived in the big Civil War era house across the field from us, my younger sister and I settled onto their sectional for some late-night television. During a commercial, we heard an odd, high-pitched noise. It wasn’t coming from the TV. The two little girls we were watching slept lightly farther down the long, curving sofa, awaiting their parents’ return. So we tiptoed around the room, looking for the source of the strange noise.
To our bewilderment, the squeaking noise seemed to be coming from the fireplace. I leaned closer and saw a small black creature crawling on a log! I stifled a scream when I realized it was a bat. I knew what bats could do! I watched Dark Shadows after school every day! I grabbed the folding fire screen and flattened it against the stone fireplace opening. Then I shoved an ottoman against it to try to trap the bat in place. Ha! I would protect us all!
I sat on the couch, monitoring the fireplace screen. The hideous little creature began clawing its way up the screen, edging ever slowly toward the slight opening at the top where the screen didn’t fit tightly against the rusticated stone. It was going to get out! And fly around the room, probably getting tangled in our long hair! I just knew it!
My sister called our older brother, who eventually agreed to come down the road to dispose of the hideous thing. He found a pink Mr. Bubble box in the family’s trash masher and used the fireplace poker to nudge the bat inside as we girls watched from the other side of the sofa. He ended up tossing it in the ditch on the way home. How did we know?
Just as we settled back onto the sectional with a popcorn reward for our quick problem solving, if not for our bravery, and with the kids now snoring away, we heard another squeak. The friends of our invader protested his capture. Three more bats crept and crawled and stretched their bony wings inside the firebox. Another call to our brother, a broken light fixture above the fireplace, and an off-handed explanation from the parents that they’d just had the chimney cleaned was enough to end our evening… and our babysitter/client relationship. It also cemented my hatred of bats.
But bats weren’t the only hideous creatures that terrorized me.
A year or two later, in my required high school biology class, the teacher announced we would have a lab the next day. I wasn’t impressed. Surely, though, it would be better than our usual classroom activity, fifty-five minutes of copying the teacher’s cursive notes from the blackboard as he sat nearby reading the newspaper with his feet propped up on a black lab desk.
In an atypically excited voice, the teacher told us we would be dissecting frogs, ones that had been “pithed,” so they’d be alive but paralyzed. This was supposed to be very exciting because we could see their hearts beating.
Blech!
But at least I had a boy as a lab partner. Maybe he’d want to handle the slimy thing and do all the cutting.
Sure enough, he didn’t mind, but I had to do something to get my participation points while the teacher circulated throughout the room. As my lab partner stretched one of the specimen’s lower legs onto the black wax pad, I took a wig pin and stabbed it, about ankle high. That wasn’t so bad, I thought. I stabbed the other long leg as my partner held it and the frog’s belly still. I was starting to be kind of pleased with my participation.
Then the boy took one of the frog’s arms and pulled it to the side. Confident and ready with another wig pin, I jabbed the sharp metal into the frog’s wrist and secured it to the wax. My partner, ready for the fun part that involved scalpels, let go of the pithed amphibian to reach for the tool.
Then it happened.
Just as I started to jab in the last wig pin, the frog REACHED ACROSS ITS BODY with its free hand and grabbed the pin that secured its other arm! That frog was trying to pull out the pin and escape! And if it could do that, what could it do to me? It might want revenge! Did I care that it might object to our surgery without anesthesia?
Heck, no! I had to get out of the way before it attacked! I shrieked and jumped backward.
The teacher ambled over to see what was wrong. “Oh, I guess it wasn’t pithed,” he calmly announced when I pointed in horror at its hand clutching the pin.
That was enough. I have no idea what the poor, unpithed frog’s beating heart looked like. I was too traumatized to look, and I’ve hated frogs and toads ever since.
My horror of small creatures continued, I’m ashamed to admit, to when I was a young mom.
My three kids and I lived in a small duplex ranch house adjacent to a field where new housing construction had begun. I’d been in “I-can-handle-it” mode for a few months as a newly single parent when I noticed mouse droppings in the bathroom. Why the bathroom, I’d never know. There was nothing tasty there. I considered what to do. I’d seen the bloody destruction of conventional traps, so I cleverly bought the new glue traps instead. No blood, right?
One morning soon after, when the older kids were at school, my three-year-old son reported a noise coming from the bathroom closet. He was the kid who always heard interesting noises, noticed and loved animals of all kinds, and picked up anything interesting. Every evening, I emptied string, nuts and bolts, acorns, animal fur, and tiny toy parts from his little blue jean pockets.
As he looked on, I opened the bathroom closet door to investigate. There, on the floor, stuck to the rectangular yellow glue board trap was a mouse. Still moving and squeaking for its life.
What I did next, I am not proud of.
But my son did like little critters.
I closed the closet door and invited him to go with me to the garage. I found a spade and carried it back to the bathroom. Then I said in as lilting and inviting a voice as I could manage, ”Look at the cute mouse! Shall we take him out to the garage?”
When my little son nodded, I handed him the spade and coached him into wriggling it under the mousetrap as the mouse squeaked and squirmed. I did kind of help him balance the spade, so the sticky trap wouldn’t fall off as we hustled through the apartment and out the garage door. Then I took the spade and dumped the mouse and trap into the tall plastic trash can.
It was wrong. I know it. I’ve felt bad about my cowardly behavior for years. Luckily, my son doesn’t remember it … or has blocked it.
I’ve had several other encounters I’d like to forget. Cleaning out a lakeside boat shed and finding a nest of mice who’d made winter beds in the kapok from life jackets. Stretching out on my new candy-striped shag bedroom carpet to read, only to find a dead mouse five inches from my face. Having one of my sixth-grade science experiment mice eat the head off his research partner in an apparent drug-induced frenzy. Grabbing onto the post between two horse stalls for balance as I slid a door closed and then finding a bat under my hand. Coming out of my office in the early morning to spot something dark hanging in the upstairs hallway after the furnace guys had used the attic access in my office. Walking through the garage service door on early mornings and turning back to see it covered with pooping tree frogs ready to eat the bugs the dusk-to-dawn light lured in.
Yep, I’ve had my fair share of shuddery encounters. No wonder I was grossed out by the freeze-dried frog in the doorjamb today.
Thankfully, my husband returned, looked at it, uttered a very bland “Huh!” and grabbed a paper towel to remove it with JUST HIS HAND. After a few minutes, I breathed more easily and stopped thinking about possible repeat scenarios. And now that I’m calmer, I can see one consolation for my many experiences and resulting fears. And for that, I will ever be thankful.
I escaped from teaching high school students, keeping this major secret that could’ve potentially created so much personal terror and totally ruined my teaching persona.
I hate frogs and toads, and I really hate mice and bats.
