Chapter 12 (Animals I’ve Known and Loved, cont.)

Oh, Rats!

Throughout my life in Woburn I had an assortment of pets, the oddest being a chameleon I sent for by mail. (It’s probably outlawed now, as it seems cruel.) It was actually an anole, or American chameleon. But the first one sent arrived shriveled and dead in it’s small cardboard box. We sent a letter to the return address and they shipped another. I hesitantly opened the box pulling out the sphagnum moss around it, and out popped a beautiful little green lizard. There were no directions for care, and I worried that it wouldn’t find enough insects on our indoor plants. I never even thought of housing it in an aquarium or terrarium--we just let it roam freely on Mom’s potted flowers. It seemed to do well until one day when it made a rapid movement in front of the cat. One playful chomp, and he was but a brief memory. I don’t even remember if it really changed colors.

Around that same period of time, my brother had inherited Tucker and Dan’s paper route, since they graduated to after school and weekend jobs at local greenhouses. At one time, Woburn was called the Greenhouse Capital of the World.

Eventually Jerry would split the route and I would take over delivery in a nearby group of tightly knit neighborhoods that sat like an island once you drove up the one street from where all the other little drives branched out like a prolifically limbed tree to smaller neighborhoods of houses and cottages . While Jerry alone ran the route, a customer gave him some pet rats. They weren’t plain white, but tri colored, like the coloring of Indian Paint ponies. He kept them in their cage--a wood boxy wood frame and hardware cloth. He took care of them in feeding them and making sure they had water, but I felt sorry for them as they were left in their little cage a almost all of the time, especially where Jerry had to do the newspaper route after school every day and on Saturday. They’d trot around in circles out of boredom. I began to take them out for little exercise sessions. My brother finally gave me them, and I brought their box up to my sleeping porch once the weather was warm enough, as that’s where I slept though the summer. It was a small room over the front porch, with seven windows on its three sides, and a windowed door to my regular bedroom in back. With that door closed, the rats couldn’t get into trouble or get away if I let them roam.

I’d let my rats roam in the sleeping porch and they used their box for eating and their bathroom. They were very clean and intelligent pets. There were two males and a female…and I could tell very plainly which were the males, as once they matured, they had rather large testicles which seemed ugly to me, and I never saw that in pictures of lab rats, so it kind of surprised me. But otherwise, they were handsome pets. They would weave through a large plywood dollhouse I had that sat as high as a standard bureau, across from the bed, so I could lie on my side and watch their antics. It seemed as though it was made for them, but it had no stairway, so I would have to be their elevator. I’d carry them about, but no longer let them get near my ears. I really think the one I was cuddling at the time thought my ear lobe was a piece of cheese. Other than that they never harmed me.

I wasn’t raised in the city. Rats never menaced us. To me they were like rabbits or even cats when it came to their place as pets, even more than large mice. But one night as I lay sleeping, I turned on my side during the night awakening just enough to catch the silhouette of one of my rats walking over the stuff piled atop of my dollhouse. I should say slinking. The way a rat walks normally just gives them an appearance of sneaking about which just looks like curiosity in the light of day. But the sight of this shadowed figure in the middle of the night stirred in me an innate fear coming from a deep distant place inside me I never knew existed. From then on the box that held their feeder and bathroom was to also be their bedroom, and they were locked in at night.

My mother didn’t want them to get loose in the house so there outings were mainly in the sleeping porch. They loved climbing, so I would sometimes take them out to a small elm tree that stood alone on the front lawn. I’d let them climb up, putting their box at the foot of the tree and await their return from their tree “play pen.” One day I decided they needed a larger tree, and let them climb the Catalpa. I lay on the ground underneath watching them wend their way up the trunk and along the spreading limbs exploring this large tree. I soon lost track of their whereabouts. I wasn’t worried, as there was no other tree close enough for them to jump into its branches. Eventually they would have to come down the trunk, as even the lowest branches from which to possibly jump, were pretty high off the ground.

I kept an eye on the bottom of the tree for nearly an hour, and decided they should be done exploring, and climbed up to search for them. I looked carefully along every branch. There was nowhere they could hide. They were gone! It was as if they had evaporated into thin air. I couldn’t believe it.

Later I figured that they must have gone to the end of the lowest branches and checked to see if I was looking in their direction and quietly made their leap for freedom. I never saw a trace of my pet rats again. Perhaps that was good, as my mother was sure that we would then have a rat problem from my little rat escapees.