Day 111 - Possum Jaw (Give)

Ahhh, memories!

I remember the spring afternoon I hopped up the steps and into the trailer I shared with my best seminary buddy, Tim.

Something didn't smell right.

I gathered up a mound of dirty laundry and stuffed it in the washing machine, confident the problem was solved.

It wasn't.

The smell got worse - especially in the evening when the furnace kicked on. Tim and I scratched our heads. What was that smell??

The next afternoon when I got home from class, the smell was stronger. Where had I smelled that stench before?? Then I remembered the time a guy in my college dorm kept a big old fat snake as a pet - under an overturned laundry basket on his floor. The snake escaped, crawled into the dormitory wall through a hole and promptly DIED.

THAT was the smell in our trailer: dead animal.

And we had a pretty good idea what sort of body was rotting under the trailer - for months Tim and I had joked about the troll that would bang around beneath our feet. We figured it was a possum that came and went after dark and seemed to like snuggling up against the furnace ducts. We had talked about plugging the hole in the skirt which allowed the possum to come and go, but we had never taken action.

Now we regretted it.

I still remember Tim's exact words: "Who do we call?"

I replied with something snide like "I don't know ... let's look up Dead Possum Removal in the yellowpages."

He left it up to me to crawl under the trailer. I naively thought I would find the possum corpse on the bare ground, fish it out and we'd be done. It didn't take me too long to realize that the trailer had a floor and a sub-floor ... and the possum was sandwiched in between.

For several days we lived with the stink by keeping all the windows open. We weren't sure what to do, but we were pretty sure it would take months for a possum corpse to dry up.

About five days into this, I returned from class, headed up the back steps and noticed a couple dozen flies gathered on the outside wall of the trailer. I knew where my possum was.

When I cut a section of the outside wall, there was no doubt I was on the right track! I reached into the darkness with both hands covered in Walmart bags and delivered the slimy possum like a baby.

Again, we didn't know what to do with the body, so I tossed it in the ravine behind the trailer.

And a few months later, I collected my trophy. Because ultimately, I WON.

Ever since, I take any chance I get to kill a possum.

I'm putting these bones in a letter to Tim so he can relive the happy memories too. Don't know what he'll do with them afterwards...