Rattitude

Disclaimer: you should not read this post if you're eating or if you plan on doing so at any point during the next 3-5 days.  

If you've been hanging out with us here for any length of time, you know we have a little problem in our attic.  It's actually kind of a big problem.  This is what it looks like:

It's a roof rat.  See the pointy nose, floppy ears, and body-length tail that distinguish him from your run-of-the-mill Norway rat?  On his own, he's maybe even kind of cute, right?  

Unfortunately, we have more than one living upstairs.  (Praise Jesus / Buddha / Allah / FSM / Goddess / Shiva / fill-in-the-deity-of-your-choice-here-- they do not or cannot come down into the rest of the house).  We don't know how many, but we do know that there were at least four up there today, because that is the number of dead rats that our pest-control company removed this afternoon.  Yes.  Four dead rats.  Four smelly, fly-infested, gooey-to-dessicated rat corpses.  Not so cute now, huh?

In the six months we've owned this house, I've learned a lot about rats (see my expert rat-type analysis above).  You see, where I come from on the East Coast, you do not have rats in your house unless you 1) are an utterly filthy person, 2) own a pet python, or 3) live in an overcrowded prewar NYC apartment building with lots of neighbors who are either utterly filthy or own pet pythons.  Okay, so maybe you have a cute little mouse or two, shitting in the corners of your closets and occasionally chowing down on an unattended box of Wheat Thins.  But you do. not. have. any. rats. in. your. house. ever. 

So when we moved here and everyone-- from the neighbors to the home inspector-- was super cavalier about rat infestation ("Every house in this town has them!" said one colleague helpfully), we were more than weirded out.  Okay, fine, we thought.  We will get rid of the rats, and then we will be the only house in town that doesn't have them.

We thought that because-- despite all our fancy postgraduate degrees-- we are clearly not that smart. 

As soon as we moved in, the neighbors' apple and pear trees began depositing fallen fruit on top of our carport faster than we could clear it off.  You know what rats love?  Rotting apples and pears!  We watched in silent horror one balmy evening as a rat ran across our cable line and onto the roof, surely on his way to enjoy his next fruity meal.   We waited helplessly through the fall as the apples on our own tree matured.  We started picking them to no avail-- every morning we'd wake up to find our yard littered with the chewed-up cores of apples that had fallen in the night.  And if they weren't happy with the tree fruits, they surely loved the raspberries and blackberries growing towards the rear of the yard.  Add in a few persimmons and the rosemary thriving under our picture window, and they were basically eating at WD-50 every night.

After seeing the epic amount of rat turds (ugh) in the attic, Ray spent days up there sealing up every possible gap with hardware cloth, but there were a few places he just couldn't get to.  So our pest-control company put a poison box up there (do not even START with me about being humane.  One word for you: hantavirus).  For months the box remained undisturbed-- turns out roof rats prefer nature's bounty to anticoagulants.  Finally, shortly after the last apples had fallen, we noticed a faint whiff of something we could only detect while sitting on our sofa or standing in the corner of the guest room.  Having little experience with dead-ass rodents, we didn't know what it was.  One night I asked a friend who'd had her own rat-related struggles to sniff the corner of my guest room.  She high-fived me: "You got one!"

Great!  I thought.  It'll just decompose up there and the smell will go away and we can all go back to pretending that we aren't sharing our home with a bunch of disease-ridden rodents.  But that actually isn't what happens at all.  Yeah, the smell goes away... right about the same time that your house fills up with gigantic, slow-moving, loud-buzzing flesh flies. 

Cue the pest control company.  One slimy dead rat was summarily removed from the attic above the guest room.

Two months passed.  Maybe there was only one rat up there all along!  To paraphrase Mrs. White, I've always been a rather stupidly optimistic person.

Last night I was chopping onions and I heard a deafening buzz.  Out from the recessed light in the soffit above the kitchen sink dropped the biggest. flesh fly. I have ever. seen.  It was seriously the size of a quarter.  And when I say flesh fly, you should know I'm talking about this:

That's pretty much actual size. [barf]

Then this morning I killed one on the picture window, and on the way to the grocery store the afternoon I looked in the third-bedroom window and spotted another (don't worry, they're all dead and vacuumed up now).  Cue the pest-control man.  He only needed about five minutes to locate and remove four mangled rat corpses from the insulation in the attic.

The moral of this story is that rats and flies are disgusting.  And also, that a beautiful lush green lawn full of mature fruit trees is not a blessing-- it's a curse.

The struggle continues.