It started last Friday. I opened the sliding glass door to help cool the house down because Becca was coming over to get ready before her wedding. It was nice by the way, but not what this is about. As soon as I opened the door Wesley took a couple of big sniffs and said “eew, stinky”. I didn’t have to take a big whiff, it did smell. I closed the door, but it had already permeated the house and it lingered for a couple of hours. I figured something died in the back yard, but I wasn’t sure where. Anyway we were too busy getting ready for Mat and Becca’s wedding.
So Saturday rolls around and it smells. Bad. Really, really bad. Can’t open the door for even a second. After a couple of minutes of smelling around the back yard it was pretty clear it was coming from the deck. But not the high part of the deck I might be able to crawl under. It was coming from the low deck, but the smell was so strong that I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It was giving me a headache and was so overpowering that I couldn’t smell directionally as it were. So, and I admit I”m a bit proud of this, I had to figure out a way to find the source of the smell without ripping all the boards of the deck up. It dawned on me that a smell this bad would attract a fair number of flies. Ten seconds of looking for flies, instead of smelling, and I could see the exact spot where they were going in an out like the drive-in at a fly fast food joint.
It didn’t take me long to realize that the smell was from a dead opossum. From the bones we found and the fact that a number of screws were missing or had stripped heads, it was obvious that this was not the first opossum to stink it up here. They had quite a nice little house going. We did feel a bit bad at having dumped Wesley’s water table out near that part of the deck a bunch of times. As I was removing the large dead opossum I saw some babies. At first I thought they were both dead. After all, for the mom (I assume) to smell this badly she must have been dead for some time. But then one of them stood up and waddled up under the deck. He poked up a minute later and I grabbed him.
Amber ran inside and looked up what to do. Basically do nothing. We called the animal rescue folks in Austin, but they were closed. We put him in a box, got him warm and comfortable with a heating pad and towels and set him in the garage. Wesley had already started calling him “My opossum”. When it became clear that we weren’t going to hear back from the rescue folks that day we did some more research and decided to try to give him some Pedialyte and water. He took it pretty well and even went to the bathroom a couple of times. I had some hope that he might make it through the morning. Sadly by 6am the next morning he was dead.
I had expected Wesley to ask about him immediately upon waking. But instead it took him a couple of hours. He ran into the garage asking about “my opossum”. I had been thinking for some time about what I would tell him. I didn’t want to lie, but I know he doesn’t handle it well when insects are dead so I needed something. I told him the truth: The baby opossum is with his mom. I left out the part about the garbage can.
