This is a bit gross, so if you’re squeamish, you might want to stop reading…

Joe and I are having our front porch stabilized, and in the process of removing the stairs, the carpenters revealed the final resting place of what appears to have once been a possum. Why it chose to die under the bottom step, I don’t know. Did it freeze to death this past winter? Was it sick? Did it die of a broken heart? I guess we’ll never know.

What I do know is that I can say unabashedly that I’m glad it died before it found its way into our basement. I know that sounds cruel, but I say that only because we had about three of the neighborhood cats who took up residence on and off in our basement this past winter. We concluded that there was a hole somewhere in the foundation (presumably under the front porch) because that’s the only way that they could have found their way in.

We weren’t really all that upset that there were cats living in the basement. They were just trying to keep warm. Still, they did set off the alarm a couple of times and pissed all over the place on more than one occasion. One night the upstairs smelled so bad as a result of the cat piss that I used like half a bottle of Febreze in the basement and burned a bunch of candles upstairs, since it was one of the nights we were rehearsing with our band.

The point here is that had it been a possum living in the basement, that would have been a much bigger problem. They are considerably more wild than a neighborhood cat, and I’ve heard that they can be mean mother fuckers when cornered. I’m glad that the poor bastard who died under our stairs never found his (or her) way into the basement.

R.I.P.