Under a Rat Moon

My baby surprised me the other day by reaching up and touching his head when I read the word “head” aloud from one of his books. I had not been trying to teach him body parts. He’s 15 months old, and to be honest, I haven’t been too worried about teaching him anything. We just do, and I assume he’ll learn. With so many different and conflicting strategies on how best to raise our children, it all feels a bit excessive. Much like religion, everyone is so certain their way is the right way and everyone else is wrong, and meanwhile, time passes and people live and people die regardless. My thoughts are that, as long as I interact with him and talk to him and show him around our little world, he’ll eventually learn what’s yellow and what’s a frog and what’s a foot and arm.

So it surprised me that he knew “head,” because I had never attempted to teach him. He also, to my delight, knew “belly” and “feet.” Seeing the little things he’s figuring out is the most magical thing I’ve ever experienced. I’ve tested him on some other things – legs, hands, ears – and he doesn’t have those figured out quite yet. Hands in particular might take him a while. For him to ever learn that word, I’ll have to make an effort to stop referring to them as his rat grabbers.

He has never grabbed a rat. I believe he would grab a rat if he had the opportunity, but there haven’t been any rats in our house since the day I found out I was pregnant, two years ago this week. I learned of his existence under a rat moon.

I had just gone to my little home gym to get in a workout before meeting a friend for the Mariners game when I saw a rat scurrying out from under my treadmill. He stopped midway through the room and stared at me. I stared at him. For a second neither of us moved, and then I screamed and he ran back to the treadmill. I was too horrified to move. I texted my husband “there’s a rat in here send help.”

I’m a sensible woman who knows better than to be afraid of a rat. It’s mice that terrify me. They’re the ones with all the diseases, and in the winter they fill up our sheds and cabins and RVs and then in the spring we try to sweep up the mess and their devious little diseases get into our lungs and we die. No, not a rat. But the thing about rats is there’s never just one. So if you see a rat, you’ve probably already got a huge fucking mess on your hands.

In our case it was our neighbors who had the mess. Our garage shares a wall with theirs, and I could see the little spot they’d chewed through to get into ours. And get into ours they did. There were little rat shits everywhere. All along all four walls of the garage. A variety of sizes – there had been rat babies. Rats is one of those messes where it feels impossible to even start. It’s such an insurmountable mess. There’s no right way to do it. It just feels, in that instance, like you will never have a garage without rats again.

Our garage is relatively sparse. We have shelves along one wall and “gear” along another – camping chairs, shovels and rakes, a lawnmower. Along a third wall is our washer and dryer and our chest freezer. The fourth wall is the garage door. It’s just a single-car garage, but we keep it empty enough to actually park our car inside it. Not a lot of other households in our neighborhood can say the same. A couple houses down, they use their garage as a workshop, with tools and parts everywhere. Another house stores a bunch of old kid gear in theirs. And our direct neighbors, they keep their garage full of rats.

So it could have been worse. We could have discovered a rat problem in a garage packed floor-to-ceiling with junk. All I had to do was drag everything into the middle to clean up the mess. I think I wore like six masks. I was lying earlier, and am at least a little afraid all critters are loaded up with diseases. Fortunately, I found no evidence of actual rats aside from the one I’d seen – it seemed the rats had come, had a monstrous shit party, realized we had nothing for them to consume, and gone back to the all-inclusive rat resort that is our neighbor’s garage.

The shelves in our garage house all kinds of things we don’t use often. One shelf holds outdoor things – sleeping bags, a tent, my beloved inner-tube. Another holds a lifetime supply of compostable utensils, bowls and plates leftover from our wedding reception and some seldom-used outdoor cooking items (I think somebody left a turkey fryer here at some point?). The third shelf holds my husband’s home-brewing supplies. These things get used even less than the rest. What I didn’t know at the time was that several of the bottles on that shelf were still full of years-old beer, something my husband had brewed and seemingly forgotten. These were the bottles that fell off the shelf and shattered.

The rat poop was one thing. Getting the smell of old beer out of a hot garage was infinitely worse.

After finishing that project – my husband was gone for most of it, conveniently lounging in a recliner at the blood bank giving platelets – there was little I wanted more than a strong drink. Fortunately, I had plans to meet a friend at a bar later before making our way to the game. Shortly before leaving to meet him, I took a pregnancy test “just in case.” We’d been trying, but I assumed it was much too early to get a positive test (8dpo, for those who speak the language). And of course, because he has always loved to dash my plans, my little buddy made his presence known with the faintest of double lines.

When I say there was little I wanted more than a strong drink, this baby was what I did want more. We were eight months removed from a particularly difficult miscarriage that had forced us to quit trying for several months while I went to the hospital for weekly blood tests. I was overjoyed to get that positive test, but it would take me many, many weeks to start allowing myself to believe a real baby was going to come of it.

I met my friend at that bar. I had a water. We went to the game, and the Mariners beat the Toronto Blue Jays 8-3. The Blue Jays were also born under a rat moon. I know it because every away series near the border is an excuse for their rabid fans to descend upon that poor city and piss and shit all over its garage floor and then desert it when there’s nothing left to consume, leaving the poor inhabitants of that city gazing around at the ruins, wondering how they’ll ever clean it up. I worked for seven years at a bar across the street from the stadium and I experienced it first hand. I’ve only ever seen a Blue Jays fan stand on his table and poor out his beer while singing “I’m a little teapot.” I’ve only ever seen a Blue Jays fan flash a children’s birthday party as the manager dragged him from the building.

I never again saw that rat who was under my treadmill, seemingly the last of his family to return to the garage next door. For a while I suspected he’d crawled inside the treadmill, but if he died in there it never smelled. It’s an unsettling thought, walking on a treadmill and wondering if the belt is slowly sanding down a rat corpse each time it loops through the machine.

My neighbors are still running their little rat motel, which I know because I see a new pest control truck outside their house every few months. I’m always a little afraid a few adventurous rats will wander back over to my garage. But I do know that if we do end up with rats again we’ve got an advantage because, where most babies have hands, my baby has little rat grabbers. And a head, a belly and feet. And so far, nothing else.