The Garage SAGA - Day 1

We stored all our shit in the garage while we were gone. Now we’ve opened it up to slowly retrieve our things and fill an empty home back up. But we’ve found that we weren’t the only ones to store our shit in the garage. Large pinky sized turds and the smell of yellow crusty urine are what fell out of the garage in heaps instead of just our stacked boxes.

I think of sitting back in the cold van watching it rain outside. Rob and I are itching to be outside but the weather is bogging us down. Instead we’re doing our perspective things. He scours Cryptocurrency charts while I write about the flowers and mushrooms and intricacies of the moment. And then I think of theirs,

the rats,

the fat rats,

the rats with a mansion of places to run and track their dirty little paws.

While we sat crammed in a cage,

the rats where free.

The rats were dry.

And the rats were well fed.

Rob dug back to the horde of food he loves to store for just in case and found a trail.

Dirty boxes.

Holes chewed through cardboard.

A Datrex emergency ration wrapper lays empty on the floor.

“That’s one of those bars that a person can live off of for a week,” Rob turns to tell me through his dust mask. We both visualize the implications of that.

“Those rats are colossal,” I tell him, surprising myself with a word I rarely use. He continues to follow the trail next up a box through a load of pillows now soiled. And up onto the top of the wood cabinet that is locked up with our food. “Do you think they chewed in,” I ask him disgusted. He pulls at the door right where the dirt from dozens of paws has left a spot of sooty grease. These are the rats of NIMH.

I see them in the yard as Leo described them. He sat with a telescope aimed out the window watching them make quick work of the chicken food hanging a foot above the ground. One leaps off the ramp that leads up to the chickens perch. He swings the feeder. And as the feeder reaches the peak of its pinnacle a second mouse leaps onto the grains. He sits and stuffs his dirty cheeks and leaps to the ground as another one takes his own leap onto the feeder. And this is how they work, demolishing the feed we spend our money on.

And these same mice are kicking it with our rats, the rats that have made their way into the closet of food. The destruction is devastating. Five pound bags of popcorn are ripped open and emptied. Noodles, rice, mac and cheese, and the list continues of stored foods lost. And that was just today. We closed and locked the door and decided it was time to go on a walk instead of deal any further with the matter.

But tomorrow is another day and work must be done.

If you liked this please check out my post about what happened to our BED!

(GIF's sourced from GIPHY)