
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 2, 1992                   TAG: 9203020202
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

`THE THING' IS UNSTOPPABLE

MAYBE YOU remember this: On Jan. 20 I told you about this thing that's been living in our house with us. It's a thing that - apparently - thrives on mice, because the scritchings and scratchings we've been hearing this winter aren't those delicate little squeaky sounds mice make, but are instead great heavings and huffings and scramblings in the walls.

We speculate it's a possum.

Whatever it is, it's still with us.

Despite several applications of window screening over the ventilation holes in our home's foundation. Despite, even, the application of an aluminum grill over same.

The window screening has been alternately torn out, folded neatly out of the way, pushed all the way through the holes (thus opening them again), and balled up in knots in the grass.

The aluminum grill - the morning after its applications - was quite literally shredded. We didn't see any point in trying grills again.

If this is in fact a possum, it's one very determined possum, indeed.

I'm not wild about the bumps and scramblings and (occasionally) hissings with which this intruder is filling our evenings. The noises start about 7 o'clock, and they move up from inside the back-porch wall around through the pump-room and bathroom and laundry-room walls, and sometimes even enter the living- room ceiling, where we're trying to watch television.

But the thing that does bother me about our possum intruder is this: What does he want?

What is there lurking in the walls of our house that's so enticing to possums that he (she? it? or, God forbid, they?) can't resist? In my most warped moments, I find myself imagining that the hollow walls of our pump room hold a possums' house of ill repute. The noise supports that theory.

In other matters:

I've received only one reply to my request (Feb. 10) for information regarding singing telegrams. A caller reminded me that in "The Sound of Music," the delivery boy sings to one of the Von Trapp children after handing over his missive.

I'm forced to conclude that either (a) no one in the world knows anything more about singing telegrams than I've already been able to find out, or (b) nobody read that column.

I choose to believe it's (a).

Is there no one out there who ever delivered telegrams? Were you never called on to sing? Perhaps the phenomenon of singing telegrams, as I suspect, was confined to big cities with lots of unemployed actors in residence.

Whatever. I'm still interested in this topic, if anyone knows anything.

Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.

by CNB