True story: the packrat and the Packrat

[labelleizzy]

My dad died at the end of April, twenty years ago in about two weeks.

Recently I've been reflecting on life with him, and life without him.

After he died, Mom sold the house we'd grown up in. The yard sale paid for the moving van, and got rid of lots of extra stuff; furniture, record player, vinyl records, duplicate china. But Mom and I were still packrats.

She and I moved from that 5 bedroom house to a three bedroom house, where we dedicated one of the three bedrooms and most of the garage to storage. We were mostly storing crap, as I can freely admit at this distance.

We come by our packrattitude honestly in my family. Both Mom's parents were raised during the Great Depression and slogans included "we'll fix it later!" and "don't you dare throw that away, you're going to want it!" Every house had multiple junk drawers, and piles of stuff in closets and garage.

The "guest room" of this rental house was crammed full of boxes, bags and piles of my "craft crap". There was some stuff in there which might have been useful, if I could ever have located the treasure among the trash. Do you ever think, "man, I know I have this tool/supply/fabric/colored marker in my stash, but I just can't FIND it," so you buy another whatever it is?

Can't count the number of times I bought duplicates of things I already owned. Embarrassing to think of now.

Anyway, the house itself was decent, if dated (1970's ceramic tile floor in living room and kitchen, yo) and a little chilly in autumn and winter. It had an in-ground fish pond and some space to garden and hang out in the back yard. Sometimes we had visits from local wildlife. Once I was walking to the kitchen to start the coffee and saw a white crane as it took flight out of the fish pond, and once a skunk tried to come into the house seeking dog kibble.

But the most mysterious visitor was inside the house. It took us a few weeks to realize what was happening, in spite of finding gnawed electrical cords more than once and little dark pellets scattered at the corners and edges of rooms.

The epiphany hit us one evening when I went into the craft crap storage room and found tufts of ... dog hair? but dog hair of the wrong color. Our dog was Captain, a tiny black Pomeranian. Our first dog had been a tan and brown Pomeranian named Montana, and my little brother had saved up a bag of her hair before she died ...

Wait. There's the bag, how did it get...

chewed open

Dammit. *shudder*
We had a rodent in the house.

Immediately started sorting through my entire stash, grieving damaged goods I had always "meant to do something with" or "couldn't bear to give away", and tossed them in the trash. Sent bags of unwanted but undamaged fabric to the communal sewing stash for my Renfair friends, and took several boxes to Goodwill, including the hideous latch-hook rug project in white yellow orange and olive that I started when I was eleven and never finished.

Mom called an exterminator, and they brought something I didn't know existed, sticky traps. We had at least one sticky trap in each public room. A few days later I discovered a rat, deceased, under the living room table. It was stuck to the sticky pad, partially atop the electrical cord to the lamp, which was also stuck to the pad. Mom was a trouper, and sorted the mess out. This involved breaking the leg of the rodent to detach the sticky pad from the cord.

I didn't have the cojones to do this; she did.

She threw the rat and sticky mess into the trash bag and the trash bag into the trash bin, while I made disgusted noises and felt faintly guilty at making my widowed mother do it.

Mom always sorted our messes out.
Mom has always been awesome.

This has been my week 5 entry for therealljidol and the prompt was "A Better Mousetrap".

Please go read and enjoy my colleagues' entries here. To vote for my entry, link will be *here*

Thank you for reading!