January 17, 2002

There is a rat in my home capable of removing a 10-ounce potato from a basket on a shelf at waist level (without upsetting the basket) and dragging or pushing it three feet, around two corners, to a little gap behind my recycling bins.

I presume it pushed the potato out of the basket and onto the floor. (I have decided it was pushed because the thought of a rat big enough to actually carry a large potato down the shelves is more than I can endure.) Then it had to push or drag the potato about three feet, around the front of the recycling bins, through a fairly narrow passage between the table and the recycling bins (roughly the width of the potato itself, which means it couldn't even be rolled), around the side of the recycling bins and back behind them, into the little gap between the bins and an open storage shelf.

It happened sometime between Tuesday night, when I cooked the penultimate potato, and Wednesday morning, when I discovered the empty potato basket. At first, I assumed one of the dogs had taken it. While they've never before shown an interest in raw potatoes (which I've always stored at dog level), it was the only explanation I could think of for a vanishing potato. As I had planned to use it in an upcoming meat pie, I was a little annoyed--but, after all, it's just a potato, so I quickly forgot about it.

A few hours later (in the throes of my new cleaning system obsession) I was fastidiously wiping down all of my pantry Tupperware, when I found that something had gnawed the lids on half a dozen of my Modular Mates. They're totally expensive, and they don't even sell the yellow lids any more, so I was furious.

Furious, but not surprised. I knew there was a rat or a mouse or both--I'd found droppings on the washing machine and had seen the blur of something with a greasy gray coat zipping across my kitchen floor last Saturday. It had even gotten into two different bags of flour. But this wasn't some packaged food bag. This was Tupperware, motherfucker! You don't screw with my Tupperware. I started muttering a string of curses and vowing to replace the humane, almost educational (and, thus far, completely ineffective), peanut-butter-cracker-baited Mice Cube in my pantry with an imposing sea of vicious rat traps. I actually said aloud, "This time it's personal!"

I was still cursing the Tupperware vandal when I moved the top recycling bin to clean the bottom shelves, which revealed the missing potato.

I didn't immediately understand what the potato was doing there, tucked away in that funny little space. Then I saw the shredded peelings and the big gnawed-away gap the size of a small lemon. I was horrified. This was a big potato, a nice baking potato, not some little red potato or one of those skimpy potato-sack types. I surveyed the area and realized that there was no way the dogs could have wedged the potato into that tight little spot; it simply wasn't geometrically possible. I myself couldn't have gotten it there without moving the bins, and I have opposable thumbs.

Of course, once the implications soaked in, I had to retrieve the potato from the compost bucket and weigh it, which didn't make the whole scenario any more comforting.

The rest of the night, as I continued my (glorious) cleaning frenzy, I kept hearing funny rustlings and seeing peripheral movement, sometimes from two different places at once. What if there's a whole army of them?

Oh my god. What if they formed a group and moved the potato as a team?

I don't want to think about it.

And where am I supposed to put my potatoes now?

01.05.02