Rats!

This is a slight diversion from our California San Wawkeen Valley stories...

Last night we attended a musical, wherein one of our granddaughters sang with a group of children. The title was "Rats!" The Pied Piper eventually piped all the rats out of town, but they came back when the Mayor didn't pay what he had agreed to... It was really cute, and fun, as are most all the things in which grandchildren are involved.

Rats. I've had encounters with them from early in my life. Usually you think rats are in the houses of people who are dirty and messy, but I'm not so sure about that. First of all, there was never a woman in the world who was more diligent to be clean and neat in all house-matters, than Mama. She required daily house cleaning as a matter of routine, and I never remember walking into any room in her house that looked messy, or dusty. In my lifetime I have learned there are two types of people: Cleanies and Messies. I'm a Messie. Mama was a Cleanie. But rats are all Messies, and they do not discriminate  about whose kitchen they visit.

In Pine Bluff there were rats in the attic, who came down the dark stairs in the back, chewed their way into our kitchen/back porch, and never bothered to leave a tip for their dinner. They just left a chewed hole in the wall or threshold...and a trail of you-know-what on the floor.  Come to think of it, why did I like Tom and Jerry cartoons? I always cheered for the mouse to race to the hole in the wall and escape the big, mean cat. I never related the mouse in the cartoon to the rats in real life on Second Street in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

They were a source of terror to me when I lived there. I heard adults talk about how rats will climb into the bed of a sleeping child and bite them. I don't remember who said that, but what a terrible thing to say to or in the hearing of a child. I used to have nightmares about mice and rats in that house.

Once one of my aunts killed a big rat on the back porch there. I'm sure that rat was faster than Aunt Maggie, because I knew she moved around a bit slowly, but he must have been sick or something, because he was just lying there, she said, and so she put a piece of wood on him and stepped on it, just to be real sure he was dead. Yikes! I was convinced, though, that he had rat-nephews and rat-nieces who would surely come down out of the dark attic and eat me up, taking revenge for my Aunt Maggie killing their Uncle Rat (or Aunt Rattie, whichever the case may be).

I had been in that attic once or twice. I was way too much of a coward to go up there by myself, even if Mama hadn't forbidden such a venture. But when an older cousin led the way, curious about the stuff that might be up there, I followed and held the flashlight for her while she pored over the pile of pictures, probably of the original owners of the house before it had been made into a duplex and rented out. The cars in the pictures were models from the 1920's. There was also a doll house and other old toys up there, but I was too scared to touch them. I was afraid a rat would jump out. There was also no light other than the flashlight and the light coming in through the little front window, crusty with dirt from many years of no one washing it. Mama's cleanie ambitions didn't extend to the rat-infested attic.

In the end, no rats ever ate me, or even bit me, except in my dreams.

As time went by, I found through reading and experience that rats are all over the world. Yuck. What was the Lord thinking when He made them? At Cecil Avenue Elementary School, our science teacher had some mice in jars all pickled with some kind of scientific liquid... I didn't like them enough to look too closely. Shiver...

When I was grown, married, and had a house of my own, I should never have been surprised to have those unwanted house guests, because as I have admitted, I am a Messie. In Alaska, we had Shrews, which are a little different from rats in that they come inside a house in the winter because it is cold outside, and then go back outdoors in the summer when they can find food out there. Ewww. We put out poison, and they ate it and died. You would think they would at least have had the grace to go outside and die. But no, they crawled under the couch and died, and stunk, and because I'm not a Cleanie who cleans under the couch very often, by the time I found them, they were just rat bones.

Now, I'm old, and we have a garden. My husband gets distraught because rats climb up the pea vines and eat our peas, climb up on the garden tables and eat our strawberries out of the Earth-Boxes, even when we put protective cages over them. They are not only smart; they are persistent. They Will Find a Way. And my husband gets so upset about it that it ruins his day, and he wonders out loud why life is so hard...

In my quiet time this morning I was reading some verses I'm supposed to be memorizing: Romans 8:38 "For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
39 Nor height, nor depth, NOR ANY OTHER CREATURE, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

I hand wrote that down just as I have done above, capitals and all, and laid it on his Bible so he would see it and realize that God loves us, and won't let anything separate us from Him, not even Rats. If you look at the word carefully, the word separate has a rat in it...

We'll try to go back to the San Wawkeen Valley, Delano, California for the next story...