Wild Things

Last weekend, I took a little trip into my past.  My favorite childhood book is Where the Wild Things Are; my dad used to read it to me all the time.  We were both very excited when the movie came out last year, but we could never find the time to see it in theaters.  So last Sunday night, my mom, dad, and I cleared our schedules to watch the DVD.  I don’t know if any of you have seen it, but, spoiler alert: it is pretty sad.  I think that my mom was the most affected.  She said that she still felt depressed the next day.  She just felt so bad for all of the Wild Things, and said that they really broke her heart.  While I shared her feelings, I was shocked that she was so sympathetic to a wild animal. Because my mother is not a fan of anything that crawls.  No, this was quite a contrast to her real world opinion of animals.  Maybe she loves giant furry monster-like creatures named Carol, but my mom is no friend to the everyday critter.  At all. 

My mom’s animosity towards the animal kingdom began a long time ago, before I was born.  Somehow, my dad convinced her to go on a camping trip with him.  And, being the roughing-it-experts that they are, they left s’mores out on the table.  You can guess what happened next.  They refer to that fateful evening as “the night of 1000 raccoons.”  Needless to say, my mom does not love raccoons.

The worst atrocity came about 6 years ago.  Again, the culprit was a raccoon, and this time the little devil had the nerve to die in our attic.  I mean, honestly, who does he think he is?  We figured it out when our home began to smell like a morgue, and it turns out that he had gotten himself so far in that we had to call the professionals.  That’s right, they had to cut a whole in our roof in order to remove the carcass.  Ew! So there goes strike two.

After that was the skunk. My mom read an article in the Chicago Tribune about a family in Highland Park whose house was completely ruined by a skunk who wiggled his way into the air conditioning system.  She thought about the horror for a full day, so it was only fitting that she should smell a skunk in our own yard 24 hours later.  My mom was not willing to gamble with our home, so she took no chances.  She called in reinforcements to cage up that bad boy.  Poor little guy, he never had a chance.  He was a goner. 

To bring the story full circle, our gardener informed my mom the other day that there were traces of an animal living in our backyard.  Immediately, my mom shifted into terminator mode.  She thought and worried about it for another 24 hours before asking the gardener what could be done to drive the intruder out.  He told my mother that sometimes sprinkling red pepper flakes does the job.  Before she even hung up the phone, my mom was digging through the spice cabinet looking for her hottest pepper flakes.  She shook them out all over the yard, and ended up using half of the bottle.  Take that, mystery Wild Thing.

I am going to be honest with you, there is no catchy or shameless way that I can tie this back to the bags.  So I am not even going to try.  But I will leave you with this: buy a bag. 

-Emma