There’s no getting around it: this house is its own little ecosystem apart from and despite the official residents. There’s the seed-bearing weeds that grow in the mud of the tile roof; the takaashikumo, (Heteropoda venatoria) the Japanese variant of the Huntsman Spider, with its quick and alien triangular body; its prey, the various and sundry visitors from the phylum Arthropoda that wander though; the meter long aodaisho, Japanese rat snake, that roams the garden and the crawlspace; the cute little round faced feral ghost of a kitty that lives in the eaves and walls and show up from time to time… But until the other day, I had no idea we actually had rats in the kura basement. Or at least one.
Betty began making an eerie mewling and sniffing at the door to the basement in the kitchen. Mika let her down and switched on the lights. We stood at the top of the steps peering down, content to let our wild girl from Yusuhara handle things. Betty disappeared and there were sounds of her poking about the hoes and rakes left down there from grandpa’s day. Scufflings. Skitterings. Then Betty’s tail in full fluff. And then something… a bit smaller than Betty, a bit darker than her, shot across the lit square of basement floor and vanished behind some plastic buckets and was gone.
Betty spent the next several hours down there pacing, poking in the corners but to no avail. Whatever it was–and it was a rat, surely–escaped through one of what must be countless vermin routes into the old granary. How could there not be scores of unseen largish critters roaming through this old house? And I’m not even thinking about the teeny tiny critters that must make up the overwhelming dominant populations here. No, this is a little world unto itself with generations of inhabitant species, only one of which pays the property taxes.
And you know what? It’s okay. I’ve fully gotten over my suburban middle-class phobia of critters. I’m not particularly fond of cockroaches, but I no longer feel physical revulsion. And I know the takaashikumo are simply freaky, but not particularly dangerous to a huge meat bag like me. I have no love for the clan mosquito, but since we’ve taken to sleeping under the kaiya, we’re cool.
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