It’s confirmed: we have squirrels in the attic.

Not in the metaphorical, He’s got squirrels in the attic way, though frequent readers know this can never be entirely ruled out, but in the tree-dwelling gray rodent with bushy tail that hid in Clark Griswold’s beloved Christmas tree way.

When we moved to this little neighborhood thirteen years ago it was virgin suburbia, lacking sufficient foliage to attract so much as a wild amoeba. Now? Verdant.

If you landscape it, they will come.

There’s a short roof just below our bedroom windows, and for a long time, when you could hear squirrels out there, you could see squirrels out there. They leapt to the roof from a branch of the tree we planted in the front yard, and how joyful they were, blessed little cutie pies running to and fro, cartoon hannas and barberas that we were never once tempted to blow into molecules with a bazooka.

Then yesterday the TV in the bedroom faded to black, and the toolbelted man from the place where we send the money every month said there was still a signal coming into the basement but not upstairs. He suggested that the cable might have been chewed up somewhere in between. He added with a wry grin that some people call them black squirrels, they eat so much black wire. He or someone will come back sometime to replace it, I trust with wire made of poison.

Today I stood outside the house for a while, a good excuse for a cigar. I could still hear the squirrels, but I could no longer see the squirrels.

Now I was outside and they were inside.

On the roof, fine. In the roof, not.

The wife is daring me to carry the stepladder upstairs to the spare bedroom closet, stand on the top rung, push up the access panel in the ceiling and stick my head up there for a look-see.

At which point the largest, angriest alpha squirrel will instantly attach itself to my forehead like an octopus to a mirror, and I will fall off the ladder and tumble screaming down the stairs and out into the neighborhood where someone will call 911 and local lore will be written that will be repeated at every July 4th picnic and I will have to get several shots in the butt and move to Maine where the wife wants to live anyway.

No, there will be no laddering.

Our house is fairly new and tight. Any places squirrels could get in – little roof eaves – are out of reach of the aforementioned stepladder anyway, and unappealling to the mechanically declined even if I could achieve that elevation. The all-knowing internet oracle transported me instead to Amazon.com, where I have ordered a Havahart trap – priced, like so many things there, five cents below the free shipping threshold, so I added a pen to the order. This is surely their market strategy for selling pens.

Peanut butter will be the bait and the oilier the better, say the customers who’ve bought one. There are legions of squirrel hostels like mine around the world, I discovered, and the sympathy in their Amazon comments is as palpable as it is in those magazine ads for the foreign kids born with the misshapen mouths.

No, I will not open the attic access panel. I will wait for the trap, and put it on the short roof with peanut butter inside. I will sleep under seven pillows, meantime.

I will report back.

© 2011 Jeff Sawyer

www.sawyerspeaks.wordpress.com