When I was little my family lived on a farm. Our house was technically in the middle of a soybean field. It was a four room ( not four bedroom…) house built by grandfather. We lived very simply. Our idea our interior decorating was to order curtains out of the Sears catalog, we ate dinner at lunch time and sat down to supper at what I now call dinner time. We ate white Wonder Bread and drank coke from a bottle on Saturdays when mother went to “town” and bought groceries. We were content and happy and not at all shocked when occasionly “critters or varmits” would come inside our house. We had birds come down our stove pipe, snakes curled up in our doorways and every fall when my grandaddy and daddy would harvest the crops the mice would pile up in our house like unemployed relatives. This was not a shock to us. We set traps and put out poison and moved on. We learned to shake our boots upside down in the winter to make sure there weren’t any mice nestled in them. I remember one night the family sat together watching our one and only t.v. . The mice were so bold that they would run along our trim work while we were in the same room. My dad took out my brother’s BB gun and began to shoot them. I think after awhile we just turned the t.v. off and played this redneck game until bedtime. We thought nothing of these happenings….

Fast forward thirty years. I have more bedrooms in my house than I had rooms in my childhood home. We “lunch” and serve dinner. I have draperies that were custom made for my windows, wouldn’t be caught dead eating a piece of white bread with that evil enriched flour and the only glass bottles we have in the house are the wine bottles in the wine cabinet. Yet I still have a critter in my house ! There is something alive in our attic and like the Sears curtains and the white bread I have given up being accoustomed to this occurance. My children are mortified and my husband and I are not racing to the attic stairs. I told my daughter that I didn’t care if George Clooney was sitting naked in my kitchen with a millon dollars stacked “strategically” in front of him saying “Bring me a squirrel and it’s all yours “, I was not going up there.

So I did what any modern girl would do ..I went to facebook and asked for advice. My facebook friends have such confidence in me. They assumed that I would not only open the attic door but I would set a live trap, catch the critter, retrieve the trap, place it in my van, drive it to the park, remove it from the van, get close enough to open it and set it free. Apparently they hadn’t heard about George Clooney. Steve didn’t say anything about Clooney, but he appears none too eager to make the climb.

All I can think of is Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation. I can see us all being chased around while he shreds our draperies. I do not see it ending well.

I suppose we will end up calling some kind of critter containment expert while my grandaddy rolls over in his grave. I can hear him now…”Gal, you’ve got more money than you’ve got sense.” I can’t help it. Once you have grown accoustomed to a critter free environment you just can’t go back to the BB gun.