It’s been an interesting few months. The pendulum has swung from scorching weather, to evacuation from a wild fire, to heavy rain and debris flow risk, to lots of snow and long power outages. I suggested to my husband that we sell everything, get a recreational vehicle, and hit the road. He said ‘not yet’. I suggested to my sister that we move in with her. She laughed.

All in jest of course. But it has been overwhelming, especially for my husband who is spending a lot of time fixing things and rigging things up and taking things apart in order to put them back together.

And then there was Rat. We’ve had mice in the house. We’ve even had rats in a house we lived in previously. But this one deserves a capital letter.

My husband is a big softie. He’s been known to babysit a nest of mice in his toolbox to keep me from feeding them to the chickens. A few weeks ago he saw the lid of our recycle bin had blown up in the storm and was getting rain inside. When he shut the lid, he saw two rats. One had drowned and the other was struggling, so he put a long stick inside for it to climb out.

Rat: ‘My new best friend! My savior! I’m going to follow him home!’

It didn’t take long before we started hearing rattling around in the kitchen walls. It didn’t take long before our new dishwasher quit working because the power cord was chewed through and some mysterious part broken. It didn’t take long before Rat discovered my pantry.

It didn’t take long before I started setting traps.

We have a cat who is an amazing rodent-catcher. She stores them in the bathtub to play with later and even catches critters at the neighbor’s and brings them home. But she wasn’t catching Rat and she started sleeping at the opposite end of the house. I admit I had unkind thoughts about her not catching things in her own home.

The thing is, she’s a petite cat. If you haven’t read blog posts here before, this is a cat my husband found on the road in a rainstorm and brought home tucked inside his shirt. The little bedraggled scrap now rules the house. But she was ignoring Rat.

We found out why when, two rat traps, one five-gallon bucket, and a ski pole later, we saw just how huge Rat was. It got caught in two traps at the same time and that didn’t even slow it down. I’d say it was bigger than our cat, but because of my storyteller powers of exaggeration, in reality it might have been a tiny bit smaller. Maybe. Either way it was obvious why the cat had been sleeping at the other end of the house. The thing was huge.

You’d think having a rat in the house compared to everything else going on would be trivial. But having a giant Rat eating your dishwasher while waiting for debris flow landslides and watching the snow bury your car was kind of the last straw. That’s when I suggested we move in with my sister. For now though, paths are shoveled, Rat has moved on to wherever rat spirits go, the power is back, generator gas cans are full, the wood box is full, and the pantry is stocked.

So is all back to normal then? Is all good in our world? I started writing this blog post after my son came into the kitchen.

‘Mom, there’s another one.’