(O)possum’s purpose is ponderous

Is there a possum in our garage?

I don’t think so, but maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part.

I do know that on two occasions — both of them a little unsettling — one of those critters was spotted there over the winter.

Why unsettling? Well, in the first place, possums are ugly, like rats on steroids. I’m not entirely sure that mother possums find their off-spring cute and loveable. I certainly don’t.

You’ll note that I’m not spelling the word opossum. 

Never in my life have I heard someone pronounce the word with that O at the start. It has always looked like a misspelling to me. 

And if the one — potentially — in our garage prefers the opossum spelling, that’s just tough. To me, he’s just a possum. And I just want him out of there. If he (or she) is really in there.

As a town kid, despite a lot of camping and outdoor activity, I’d never seen a possum in all its ugliness until I was about 16. Then, one night when I was driving the family station wagon home from a date, I was convinced that a giant rat had run out into the street in the path of our Ford.

The notion that it was a rat wasn’t entirely loony. There was a grain elevator only a couple of blocks away. So it was entirely conceivable that this particular possum was an extremely well-fed and especially mangy grey-haired rat.

(What did I know? I was 16.)

But my parents knew, and when I related the incident after the station wagon was safely parked in the driveway, they rolled their eyes.

To their credit, neither of them ventured to say, “You lamebrain! That was a possum!”

But being a little more possum-savvy in my later years, I can assure you that that’s exactly what they thought.

So, is there one in the garage?

It’s hard to tell, largely because it’s hard to find much free space in the garage to have a good look. And when you look, the last thing you want to find is a possum staring back at you.

At one point, the garage was clean. 

It’s a one-car version and detached from the house, but it serves the purpose, if I can get rid of enough crap to fit a vehicle into it. That has actually happened a time or two.

But at the moment, it’s kind of a mess.

In the middle, there’s a folding table that I used as kind of a glorified workbench on a project more than a year ago. Then there’s the recycling tub, some stuff from my wife’s riverwatch volunteer work, leftover boxes from the holidays and more.

Leaning up against the real workbench — which is cluttered with so many items you cannot find the surface — are several cardboard boxes in which I hope to find a table and four chairs for our patio.

They’ll replace — once they are assembled — a sturdy set that served us for more than 10 years, maybe 15, but which finally started to fall apart. 

The plan is that on some sunny spring afternoon I’ll jump into action (“jump” should be used only in the figurative, not literal, sense), open the boxes, drag out the parts, figure out the directions, bang my knuckles, draw blood at least once and put the new set together.

That, as I said, is the plan.

At the moment, the boxes just take up space and make it harder to get a handle on whether I do indeed have a possum in the garage.

I’ve found myself wondering what it might be doing in there.

I’m pretty sure it’s not reading the directions on how to put together the new patio furniture.

And I’m pretty sure it hasn’t figured out how to open the door to the garage refrigerator to grab a beer.

The only thing I know for certain is that it’s not cleaning the garage.

That’s my job. Possum or no possum. Or, for that matter, opossum.