Early this morning, I looked out my window and saw a dark furry ball near the vegetable garden. I thought that a poor kitty got lost and was taking a nap.
I went outside as quietly as I could and approached it. It didn’t move. Upon closer inspection, my sleeping kitty turned out to be an opossum. I immediately texted my husband and daughter while performing a dance called “Why Me?”
In my limited wisdom about wildlife, I know that opossums are nocturnal. So the fact that this one was in my garden during the day, I figured it had died. My daughter joked, “Is it actually dead or playing opossum?”
Armed with rubber gloves, a big trash bag, and long stick, I rolled the poor critter over and it moved slightly. I thought it was just momentum. But to be sure, I tickled its tail with the stick and, I swear to God, it started wrapping its tail around it. My daughter was right—the opossum had faked me out.
Genuinely impressed at this point, the creature held on and I carried all ten pounds of it to our slope. I dropped it gently into an area with lots of leaves so it could sleep off the day and not scare the bejesus out of me any longer.
