A Stranger in the Night

Last night, I had to walk a dog. In fact, I'm in the middle of pet-sitting visits for this particular pet family. Right now, I will have three more visits to go before their people return home.

It's true, my pet-sitting business is centered more around cats than dogs, but there also has been the occasional bird and turtle that needed care. Granted, birds and turtles are generally even easier than cats to take care of – give them some food and move on. Turtles do not want to be cuddled, and I think I must smell like a cat because birds tend to fluff up their feathers at me and shuffle to the opposite side of their cage. That's okay; no hard feelings.

Back to last night. I went to visit with a dog named Sasha. She's a good-sized dog, but sweet as a kitten. Maybe not a kitten exactly, because I know one who happens to be pretty rowdy and destructive and doesn't have a sweet bone in his tiny body but gets away with tons of mischief because he's so cute. Sasha, however, truly is sweet. I have never heard her bark, and her tail is always wagging, even though her youngest feline roommate thinks it's a play toy for pouncing on (or at, because I've never seen her actually catch the tail).

When I first started visiting with Sasha, she and I would just walk around her yard — back to front and then to the back again. She would do her thing, and we would head back inside. Now, we actually go for walks up the road. Given that it's November, it's dark in the evenings when I arrive around 7 or so. I take along a flashlight so I can see and remove the treasures Sasha might leave in neighbors' yards. The street only has one streetlight, which is rather disconcerting, but most of the neighbors leave their outside lights on, so that's helpful.

Last night, as I was waiting for Sasha to make a treasure deposit in front one house, I happened to look up into the driveway and saw something moving. With very determined purpose, a rather large opossum strolled right into the people's open garage. What struck me was the matter-of-fact way the opossum moved. He didn't stop to sniff anything or to look for movement or hesitate at all. He just walked right in and disappeared behind a car. I wondered if I should knock on the front door to say, "Excuse me, I just saw a opossum go into your garage," but decided against it.

I used to have a somewhat negative opinion of opossums. This opinion wasn't really based on anything specific. I guess it's a natural disinclination toward animals that only come out at night. But in reality, opossums are generally solitary and gentle animals (although it's true they will hiss and bare their sharp teeth if cornered). This opossum seemed to be making a familiar – possibly nightly – stop in an open garage that probably provided a bounty of interesting items.