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where I live but boy, we're overrun by possums

Until about four years ago I lived in Baltimore City. It was an old neighborhood near the city line with lots of heavily wooded areas. I often saw foxes, rabbits, raccoons, box turtles, salamanders, woodpeckers, hawks, falcons, chipmunks and lots of squirrels and the occasional possum in my back yard. The wildlife was cool but it was the urban human “animals” that made me afraid.

One spring day I went out the sliding door of my kitchen and noticed a faint but distinctive foul smell. It sort of smelled like ripe garbage fermenting in a late summer dumpster. I checked my outside trash cans but they were empty and clean. Later that day I noticed the smell in my basement. Thinking that perhaps one of my cats had killed a mouse, squirrel (or horrors) a rat, I did an extensive search but couldn’t find anything.

The next day the smell started getting much worse and seemed to be the worst around my kitchen. I checked the refrigerator, the trash can, the sink and couldn’t figure out where the smell was coming from.

By the third day, the smell in the kitchen was getting unbearable and nauseating and even the cats were acting strangely and wouldn’t come into the kitchen.

Then I remembered seeing a possum on my patio several evenings earlier and about the crawl space under my kitchen. I checked under the small deck and saw the plywood sealing up the crawl space had been chewed on and pushed aside. I took a flashlight and saw at the very far back corner, what appeared to be some sort of furry grey and white animal, still and lifeless and figured where and what the stench was coming from. It was a dead possum.

The crawl space was too small for anyone to go into and the dead possum was too far back to reach and the stench was beyond description.

Not knowing what else to do I called Lester, a real red necked good ole boy who was a professional animal trapper who had come to my house several times over the years to trap the squirrels who took up residence in my attic. I fondly referred to him as “Lester the Squirrel Molester”. Lester would trap the squirrels in cages and tell me he was going to “release them into the woods” near where he lived. I think he told me that to make me feel better but I suspected he was making squirrel stew and quite frankly I didn’t care what happened to them as long as they were out of my attic.

Anyway, Lester came out the next evening in a cold pouring down rain, took a long pole with a hook on it and extracted what was left of the possum, rotting half liquefied piece by piece. Then he threw lime back into the crawl space as far back as he could to help eradicate the smell. Lester – where ever you are, you are still my hero!

I always though possums were nasty looking creatures with equally bad and nasty dispositions but most of all I will never be able to forget that smell as long as I live. Eat a possum? No way! I’d be more inclined to eat a squirrel (but only slightly more so).