The Possum in the Pool Filter

“That’s not a mouse,” I said, slapping the cover to the pool filter back into place.

I quickly slid the two wooden planks back into position on the deck and stepped backwards from my eye-to-eye contact with the living creature that had fallen into the pool and found itself ensnared.

This past spring, I drove my mother to the family beach house to help put things in place for the summer. Sitting in the dining area, I heard the pitter patter of little feet over my head. Except it wasn’t children playing in the upstairs bedroom. It was animals of some sort running around in the crawl space between floors. When I went upstairs, I could also hear them in the walls.

“It was a tough winter and raccoons crawled in through rusted grating on the chimney,” my mother explained. “I called a trapper and he set up traps near the pool and on the roof.”

“Why near the pool?” I asked.

“The trapper saw an opening dug under the deck, which is where they might be living,” she replied.

As we sat eating lunch, the critters over our heads inside the walls took the opportunity to noisily drag something at least 20 feet.

The trapper also set poison pellets in the bathrooms and around the perimeter of the house, to combat mice that burrowed through rotted wood during…