I saw a headline on the news a few weeks ago that said, “raccoon loose in man’s house”. First, that’s dumb and I can’t figure out what makes it news worthy. Second, there’s been about 10 raccoons in my parent’s house and we never made the news. You’re all laughing and you probably think I’m lying, so allow me to expand. 2 of 3 fireplaces in my parents house have been an entryway for ‘coons of all kinds.

There’s a fireplace in my parents basement, it’s been boarded up since the 70′s and while there has never been a fire in there, but there’s been plenty of raccoons. When I was about 12 we heard what we thought were birds in this fireplace and after about a week my dad started to pull the boards back but the extreme hissing of one big, bad and angry mommy raccoon had him screwing the board back up faster than you could say “Rocky Raccoon!”. Then that momma ‘coon crawled up the chimney one night and ended up roadkill on our street. We were left with 4 baby ‘coons and no one was willing to try to pull them out. So, we waited for them to die and once our basement smelled like the elephant house in the zoo, dad had to clean out the fireplace while my brother and i stood there and gagged.

There were 2 other raccoons who came through that same fireplace. They came down the chimney and managed to push this board (which was screwed into the wall) out of their way and make themselves right at home. The first of these intruders decided to make an appearance at about 5:30 in the morning. My mom had gone downstairs to get clothes for work and there was this stupid coon sitting on my old toybox. I have never heard my mom scream like that and she woke up the entire house. The second perpetrator was NOT nice and treated us as if we were intruding. My dad just shot him instead. That’s how he rolls.

THEN there was the racoon that came down the chimney and entered through the living room. Mom found that one too, when it was eating out of our kitchen trash can. Finally, ANOTHER momma raccoon nested in that same living room fireplace and had babies. Forget being the cat people, my parents are the coon people!!

Oh, and yesterday there was a giant raccoon wandering in my parents yard, is there no end to the wild kingdom?

Now for a story that really sucks. I was reminded of this during the maid of honor’s speech at a wedding where a rather incriminating story about me was brought up, involving me convincing the bride (as a young child) to stick her hand in a dogs mouth and promising it wouldn’t bite her (it did). Then a repressed memory of said dog surfaced in my mind.

When I was about 10 or 11 we were at a cook out at a family friends house. They had a german shepherd who no doubt outweighed me by 50 pounds. I’m a little girl ok?! So anyways, one of us kids managed to anger the dog and he takes of chasing us. Unfortunately, I was the youngest, had the shortest legs, and was subsequently the slowest gazelle in the pack. Guess who got bit in the butt?