Opossums!

So, OPOSSUMS AGAIN…

First, a confession: please tell me others of you during winter use your deck or porch during winter as if it’s a sort of extra refrigerator, right?

Because we do. Have for years.

Second: I don’t know what Fannie Farmer was thinking, what with her “dozen eggs and quart of milk and quart of cream” eggnog recipe I made today—because it made TWO GALLONS.

It’s holiday time. I don’t have room in my fridge for two extra gallons of stuff!

(And store it for weeks, friends, because it’s eggnog. It needs to age.)

You can probably see where this is going.

Nope.

Nope, you don’t.

So, having had an opossum steal an entire half-gallon of my FAVORITE apple cider (winesap!) a few days ago, I was NOT going to put my precious, frothy, youthful eggnog out in the cold where Ms. Opossum might knock it over and spill it.

No. That would be dumb.

But what with the TWO GALLONS IN THE FRIDGE, something had to give—so I put a bottle of Chardonnay (open, but re-corked) on the front porch.

The front porch, because our opossum always comes to the back porch, where the compost is.

(No, in case you’re wondering, I’m not moving the compost. It’s convenient. We’ve lived here for decades and have never had a problem, until this past week.)

So, Chardonnay safely on the front porch.

Turns out, Ms. O apparently has an excellent sense of smell. Because sure enough, our dog started barking wildly at the front door. When I looked out the window, there she was…DRAGGING MY CHARDONNAY BOTTLE ACROSS THE PORCH, CORK IN HER MOUTH, TRYING TO GET IT OUT!

(Dropped jaw / wide-open eyes emoji)

Omgosh I wish I’d to grabbed my camera. Gosh, she was adorable. I mean, who doesn’t love a girl who just wants to share a glass of white?

“No, little one, you cannot have that. There’s half of bottle left!”

I went out on the porch and retrieved it. She looked at me in sad disappointment.

We gave her an apple.

She played dead for a while. Then she took the entire apple in her mouth…and dropped it, and picked it up, and spun it around and around, trying to get a bite so she could carry it away. Note: give the opossum apple slices next time, lol.

And right now, she is on my front porch, happily eating apple. And my Dalmatian is going back and forth to the window, confused and barking like mad. But life is good.

And maybe we will have an opossum hanging around for a while. They don’t carry rabies, and they eat ticks. I love them.

I kinda hope we get to be BFFs.

Ps. I opened the door to check out how she was doing with the apple, and my little cat just SHOT out the door. And I shot out after her, horrified that she and the opossum would get into a fight.

But she just dashed to the icy-cold sidewalk and rolled around and showed me her tummy (she loves cold concrete for that.) And I caught her, and carried her right back in past Ms. Opossum, who she never even saw.

And that was my night.

A good, good night.

(originally published 12/28/20)