It started with a mouse.

Several mice, actually. A whole plague of them, skittering about in our pantry and nibbling at Bill’s fancy oats. Well, naturally he couldn’t let this attack on his breakfast go unanswered. He set out traps in the basement and the kitchen and we heard them go off—snap! snap! snap!—while we lay in bed, wracked with guilt. (At least, I was. Bill was filled with a spirit of RIGHTEOUS VENGEANCE.)

Undeterred by their comrades’ gruesome demise, the mice kept coming. Before long, Bill noticed larger droppings in the basement.

“Maybe a rat?” he said, and ordered larger traps.

The night he went down to set the rat traps, I was letting the dogs out when I heard a shout. Fearing the worst, I ran to the basement door.

“It’s not a rat!” he called up.

I imagined all manner of terrifying wee beasties—perhaps some frightful creature native to the region, like the turkey vulture or the Albatwitch.

“How badly are you maimed?” I shouted down the steps.

His head popped into view, thankfully with no visible gaping wounds.

“It’s a possum,” he said breathlessly. “When I saw him, he looked at me with that awkward face possums do and then just sauntered away along the pipe.”

“BURN THE HOUSE DOWN,” a friend advised.

“I mean…it’s kind of cute…” Bill replied.

“DON’T RATIONALIZE A POSSUM LIVING IN YOUR BASEMENT.”

This, of course, was good advice. Solid wisdom. Unfortunately, it was too late. We’d already grown attached to our best possum friend Patches.

Still, we could acknowledge that although this incident was almost fairy tale-like in its charm, it was neither entirely sanitary nor entirely sane to allow a possum to squat in our basement. So Bill looked up how to get rid of a possum.

They like sweet things, one article advised. Like honey buns.

When Bill told me that, I became paralyzed with delight. Because that meant I would be spending the following day baking honey buns.

For a possum.

All day, Bill kept trying to take one, but I would slap his hand and say, “Those are for Patches!”

“What kind of tea do possums like?” I asked later, and Bill wondered once again whether this episode was fun-quirky or mental-break-quirky.

That evening, we set out a bun on a little plate next to a cup of tea (Wind in the Willows style), propped the basement door open, and skittered away to peek out the window and see if Patches showed up.

“It feels like Christmas,” I whispered to Bill.

We didn’t see Patches again for a while, but Junebug began extending her nightly bathroom trips. When we’d finally venture out after her, we’d find her standing still in the darkness, staring into the copse of hemlock trees or under a bush.

“I think she smells Patches,” I told Bill. “He must still be lurking about for mice.”

One note about Junebug: Everyone she meets, whether human or animal, instantly becomes her best friend. Naturally, all of her best friends immediately join our pack, and she wants to make sure everyone understands her Rules of the Pack, which include:

1. Everyone must remain together every minute of every day. FOR SAFETY. And fun.

2. If you have to leave the house for work or errands or to go the vet or because you’re a wild animal or because you actually live somewhere else and you’re only staying here for the weekend, the rest of us must wait with our chins resting on the front windowsill and whimper until you return.

3. Everyone sleeps in the same room. The guest room is not for guests to sleep in. That’s some silly garbage nonsense. That room is for afternoon naps when Carrie’s working. And it’s also where the inside plants live. Me and my best friends all sleep together in the big bedroom. You can share my bed on the floor. If you get bored in the morning, you can chew on this squeaky gnome. Uuuusually I like to chew on it, but we can just share. C’mon, I’ll show you where it is. You’ll love it! Follow me!

So this sweet summer child was utterly gutted that a best friend had been left outside, night after night, and wouldn’t come inside with the rest of the pack. When staring at him intently didn’t work, she tried chasing him under the porch, but he cowered under the steps. Then she tried playing with him beneath the deck, but he asked her to please go away.

“Let’s go inside,” I insisted after she let out a yip and cringed away from the grumpy possum. “Patches doesn’t want to play right now.”

“No!” she gulped at me. “Carrie! It’s my best friend, Patches! He’s…my best…friend!”

In any case, our mouse problem seemed to be over, and things settled back into their normal pattern.

Until.

After deep cleaning and disinfecting the pantry from all traces of mouse droppings, I woke up one morning to more. mice. droppings. in. the pantry.

Oh, the depths of my wrath, hitherto unplumbed—and it would have remained so were it not for the dung of a field mouse!

Like any calm and sensible person, I calmly and sensibly ordered a box of sixty-four mouse traps.

“I’ll bombard them,” I muttered to myself. “It’ll be a show of force. Just try to get in here, ya varmints—WELCOME TO THE THUNDERDOME.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” a mouse said, in between bites of pita.

“Well, you get the poi—HEY. CLEAR OUTTA HERE, YOU MENACE.”

Clearly, we would need to bring in the big guns.

HONEY BUNS: THE SECOND BATCH

So that’s how I ended up sitting outside in the muggy remains of Hurricane Laura, mosquitoes feasting upon my flesh, holding a saucer of honey buns out to the gathering darkness like an offering to some pagan god.

“Patches?” I called into the night. “Patches, would you like a little treat?”

Silence.

“Do we maybe want to think this through a little more?” Bill asked me.

"Listen,” I told him. “Our mouse problem went away when we had a possum in our basement.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Except we had a possum in our basement.”

“Exactly! A possum. Who eats mice and ticks and snakes and, yes, frogs, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. And last time we didn’t even attempt to domesticate it. Maybe we can house train him. Put a little litter box down there for him. We’re on different sleep schedules—we’ll never see him. It’ll be like having a teenager.”

“And what about when Patches has babies?”

Granted, this was a distinct possibility. Growing up, whenever one of my sisters or I brought home the class pet for the weekend, it invariably had babies. Even ones we thought were male.

But I was not to be deterred. My eyes widened as I whispered, “Possum army.”

He laughed, less in amusement and more in desperate hopes that I was kidding.

“Patches would carry them all on her back for a while,” I went on, “and then we could get a bunch of leashes and walk them around town! And in winter we could hitch them up like reindeer and they could pull us around in a tiny sleigh. We’ll be the possum people!”

The look on his face was difficult to decipher in the darkness, but my guess is that he was overcome with joy over the prospect of being labeled The Possum People. I decided to make us custom t-shirts preemptively.

“What if something else comes in?” he said. “Like a snake? Or a sasquatch?”

“That’s why I’ll be waiting here. I’ll fight off any interlopers.”

“I don’t think Patches will want to come close when he smells you.”

“I’ll watch from afar.”

He still looked skeptical.

“The Great Pumpkin always comes, Charlie Brown,” I said imperiously.

We haven’t seen him yet.

Maybe he’s moved on. Other mice to eat, other homes to defend. But should he ever decide to come back here, we’ll be waiting. With plenty of mice. And a pile of honey buns.