I feel like our home is a beacon for virtually every variety and species of living creature … we’ve had field mice, birds, bees, ants, fruit flies, moles, voles, squirrels, bunnies, fox, coyote, raccoons, and deer visited upon us over the years. All that’s missing are the frogs and locusts.
One morning this past September, I came downstairs to our kitchen, looking for some lunch while talking on the phone to a friend. I turned around in the doorway to the living room, and saw a brown blob sitting on the back of the couch. It was a little too far away to determine exactly what it was; initially, I thought, “Did the dog have an accident in a really weird spot?”
I was afraid to move closer, and as I focused in on it, I realized that it was some type of living creature. Still on the phone with my friend, I whispered in short, panicked bursts, “I think there’s an animal on our couch!”
I used my cell phone to take a photo, and when I zoomed in, I could make out some beige fur and brown stripes. “It’s a chipmunk!” I whispered to my friend, “and he’s sitting there looking out the window!”
Wasting no time, I called my hero, Dave Neff, from Tim’s Pest Control in Norwalk, and begged him to come out to take care of the problem … immediately.
Dave instructed me to keep an eye on the fearsome creature until he could get to the house. However, I decided to open the front door, thinking Cheddar, as I had named him, might see himself out. Not surprisingly, he instead ran down the length of the couch, jumped onto the living room floor, and scrambled down to our lower level family room, where I believe he still resides, watching the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday afternoons with my husband.