2 weeks Ago By By Lisa Currie
Honestly, whoever has read this column knows from my vivid memoirs that Toms Brook’s streets and neighborhoods are filled with marauding night prowlers making the county’s smallest town a dangerous place after dark. Oh, this is not a situation brought about by the residents who are neighborly and hospitable. In tiny Toms Brook, neighbors share backyard conversations, exchange plants and vegetables, give keys to the fortresses we call homes, and narrate detailed accounts of the plunder by the roving bands of four-legged beasts that prowl and feast when the sun falls far below the horizon, and night settles.
In the past, it was only the outdoors that needed fortifications — electric fences, dogs with fangs, and protectors with serious weapons. As August was slipping away, things changed; those dangerous creatures entered homes, traumatized residents, stole food, and departed without even a thank you. Let me share this wicked and anguished story.
I hope you are sitting down. It’s a terrifying ordeal. To preface, we have cats — three, fat, furry and dark.
Oh, these are pleasant felines, most of the time, but Marble, named for his coloring, is known to slip in through the neighbor’s cat door looking for romance with a neighboring female who wants nothing to do with him. He’s young, determined and stupid. Once Marble’s inside peering out, we break into our neighbors’ house and remove our juvenile delinquent because he does not know how to exit.
So, when the neighbor’s cat food dish was emptied every morning, the neighbors suspected our tabby, the known delinquent. But my neighbor was suspicious. The dish was emptied, as in none in the bowl, not a crumb left.
This neighbor knows cats and knows that no male is so fastidious in eating rituals, and since my cats are borderline obese, he doubted the Currie’s felines were starving enough to devour the last morsels, cleaning up even the snippets. Some small-town detective work was necessary; concealed cameras caught the despicable fiend’s image. With no time to call for backup, this blatant home violation demanded immediate action — a cage.
With the plan devised, my neighbor — watching evening programs with one ear at the door -— heard the invader enter and begin its nightly kitchen rampage; gosh, it was not even midnight when the sounds of munching, chewing, gobbling boomed through the rooms, creating fear and dread in my neighbor’s terrified bride. Always the protector — and armed with flashlight — my neighbor marched with weapon in hand to the battlefield. The villainous opossum was caught red-eyed in the flashlight’s beam.
Without playing dead or any apologies for the meal or intrusion, the beast continued its feasting, cleaning up the scraps, turning without further ado, and going back through the cat door, avoiding the cage strategically placed at the cat door exit, but this thief was not getting away so easily. Thus, I tell my readers that uninvited marsupial shall enjoy his next meal at the (former) Valley Diner, and thankfully, there is one less marauding prowler terrorizing Toms Brook residents..
