There's No Place Like Down Home

The next day I found an opening into the crawl space. The opossum had gone through it and then climbed up the gap between the two houses into our bedroom. (We live in the historic Harbor Master's House, which is two houses side by side. Local folklore holds that the older of the two houses was built in about 1670 and that the second house was rolled alongside in about 1800. That's why there is a gap between the two parts of the house.) So I set the trap outside by the opening. The next morning we had a fat opossum in the trap. I took it to my neighbor, who agreed to let it out on his farm.

That night I heard an animal noise from the gap. Sure enough, by morning we had another opossum in the trap. And it was a different one. Well, five more opossums later, we were finally rid of the opossum family.

Spring forward a couple of months. Again, back from a trip, and this time to the smell of skunk in the house. The periodic visitation by the skunk was common, but he had always stayed outside before. That night, again, there were sounds from the gap behind the wall, and the next morning the skunk odor inside the house was even stronger and upstairs. So, thinking ahead, I tied a long rope to the trap. The next morning, there was a large skunk in it, and he was angry. This is when the rope came in handy. From a distance, I pulled the trap into the middle of the yard. (Jo Ellen, my wife, was out of town for four days, and I had promised that if I caught the skunk, I would have him dispatched quickly.) My neighbor agreed to dispatch the skunk the next day. He insisted that the skunk had to be covered after being done in because the odor level increases dramatically.

That night when I arrived home, there was a big box over the trap. Two days later, I got home a few hours before Jo Ellen was to arrive. I decided it might be nice to remove the remains before she got there. When I lifted the box off, the skunk was alive and well. I gently replaced the box. (The story about why the skunk was still alive is just one of many more.) When my animal-lover wife arrived, I told her what had happened, and she was more than a little upset. She went out to the trap, fed the skunk and let it loose.

Animals must sense when a sympathizer is around, because she didn't get sprayed.

A few months later, we had skunk odor inside again. I had blocked the earlier entry point, but we found another small hole into the crawl space and blocked it. Over the next few days, the smell got stronger. We searched for other openings and found none.

Finally, I thought that maybe the skunk was caught inside when we blocked the opening. The odor was strong by the laundry room above the furnace room. I told Jo Ellen that since she was friendly with the skunk, she might want to see if he got into the furnace room. She checked, and sure enough the skunk was there. Unfortunately, it had met its maker some days before. Jo Ellen was worried about future animal mishaps in the utility room, but she had a solution: Build a skunk ramp in the furnace room for future skunks to get back up into the crawl space. I told her that this was such a revolutionary idea that I had to share it with you.

And, finally, there's the view at sunset looking west over the Patuxent River. A view that hasn't changed for me in 30 years. And, every once in a while, it is simply glorious.

George Meng

Lower Marlboro

Life Viewed From the Porch

In my 18 years on this earth, I have been many places, tried many things and loved many people. Out of all of my experiences, you might be shocked to know that I have learned the most about life on my back porch. In the 10 years my family and I have lived in our beautiful home in Hughesville, also known as "the house across the street from the park" or "the house that looks exactly alike from the front to the back," I have lived more than some people have in their entire lives.

Last year, as I sat on my porch just days before I graduated from high school and my younger brother from middle school, I thought of all the years past and the memories that run through my mind. Weird as it might sound, some of the most important moments of my life have taken place on the porch that my father built, and rebuilt with his own two hands. As I was about to head out on my own to start another chapter in my life, I wanted to remember every sound, smell and feeling from my idyllic childhood.