This past weekend, in an effort to beautify our front yard (since we don’t have a backyard), my husband, daughter and I spent the late hours of Saturday afternoon planting flowers. Even with our combined total of 6 black thumbs, and my penchant for immediately digging up and replanting every single bulb Pete put into the earth since it “looked stupid there”: it was a pretty idyllic Brooklyn scene. LJ was perched at the top of the stoop having a tea party with Carson, her four-legged sister, while Pete and I donned our gardening gloves and worked hard at making shit look purty.
Then it happened. As I went to grab an empty planter to house some scarlet begonias (which I totally only bought because I used to live for the Grateful Dead) my hand (clad in a glove, thank GOD) brushed up against a mother FUCKING RAT. Ok, I think it may have been a very, very, VERY large mouse. Like the Walter Hudson of mice. Pete, on the other hand, SWEARS it was a rat. A RAT! In my front yard! Yeah, I know we live in NYC, but come ON!! Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago when I hemmed and hawed about planting herbs in my front yard BECAUSE OF POSSIBLE RATS? Who wants to eat rosemary that’s been nibbled by rats?
So I touched the rat and promptly shrieked louder than a tween at a Bieber signing. Seriously, I belted out a scream so loud it caused the dog to bark, LJ to drop her teacup in fear, the rat to sprint behind the garbage cans and my husband to GRAB THE PITCHFORK. Because we were using a fucking PITCHFORK to garden in our miniscule front yard in the city. What do we know? Clearly nothing.
The vision of Pete standing, armed with the pitchfork raised like a javelin took me back to before we were married and were living in an old house in Raleigh. Getting ready to move back to NYC, we had opened the attic to pull down god knows what, and somehow let in a bat. Not the baseball kind. The red-eyed, screechy demonic kind. Long story short: I ended up having to call animal control who sent over a lovely woman with bicep-high gloves to simply pick up the demon bat and put it outside. Pete, though? His first instinct, the VERY first thing his mind told him to do when threatened by a bat invasion was to grab a knife, some tape and his college lacrosse stick and fashion a SPEAR. He was going to SPEAR THE BAT. Thankfully cooler, more sane heads prevailed (mine, obviously), and the situation was remedied without spearing anything.
Back to Boca RATon, Brooklyn: after AGAIN convincing Pete that there would be no impaling, he dropped the pitchfork and sprinted into the basement to get the hose. Again, not sure what good THAT would do other than giving Ratso a bath, but I didn’t have any other suggestions: I was too busy berating the dog for not attacking the rat. Even though I kept pointing in the direction of the garbage cans and shouting “Carson! GET IT!!! GO GET IT!!!”, she just flopped down on the concrete, panting and nibbling the chives out of the nearest planter. (My CHIVES!! Covered in dog spit. Awesome.)
By the time my husband was back on the stoop, armed with the hose, the rat had climbed a little 4-inch cement wall into our neighbor’s yard, and we watched him scurry down the front path, past their kid’s bike and their plush, gorgeous garden. Phew. Ratso was no longer our problem. But he EXISTED, and that sucked a big one.
Now we just need to find a way to get LJ to stop telling EVERYONE SHE FUCKING SEES, ” I saw a GIGANTIC rat when I was having a tea party in my yard and mommy screamed SO LOUD!”. It’s only a *little* bit mortifying.
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