So Long Dump of Farm House!

We have moved into a new duplex which is much nicer and more convenient than the dumpy farm house. We are still getting everything settled and in the end it's been nice to move closer to everything and to avoid a lot of the issues of living in an old home. Also, no more dead animals to deal with. We are really excited to live in luxury for a few months before we move for rotations.

So we are excited to say goodbye to the shack we were living in and as a eulogy, a story from this past Spring showcasing how we won't miss living there at all...except for the fact Rhett can't play his drums at home anymore.



Rhett and I were chatting right before we fell asleep and heard some banging. Rhett leaped out of bed, pulled the shotgun from underneath the bed and cocked it, thinking there was an intruder. “I think some animal got under the house.” I said, pointing out a scratching noise that had joined the banging. We located the noise under our feet and stomped around until we couldn’t here it anymore. Rhett ran outside with the gun hoping to kill the culprit, but didn’t find anything. We assumed it was the groundhog that has been living under the back porch since we moved in and we were ticked. The next day Rhett found the break in route, the animal had busted through a vent under the house. Rhett repaired it and we thought nothing of it.
Two weeks later, I came home from work at 6am and our bedroom REEKED. I turned on the fan and asked Rhett what it was, no idea. He went to school and I thought possibly a wet towel or something was stinking. I did all the laundry and it progressively got worse throughout the day and the stench was more identifiable as decay. When Rhett got home from school I told him I thought something had died under the house and after taking a large whiff of the vent in our room and almost retching right there, he agreed. We called Animal Control and they were setting up an appointment and when given our address told Rhett—you live outside city limits, we can’t come. Rhett was so frustrated. “We pay all our bills to the city of Kirksville and you won’t come an extra mile?” So no help from the government and the county doesn’t have any services so we were on our own…or Rhett was on his own.
He had just studied in microbiology zooontic diseases (he explained these are diseases contracted from animals) and was too worried about contracting something to venture down in the crawlspace that night. I went to work and brought home an isolation outfit for him from the hospital. The next morning he geared up and prepared for the disgusting job.
I laced the mask with peppermint oil to help with the stench because that is what we always did in surgery when the patient was extra stinky but I underestimated the power of the oil and Rhett’s eyes were watering from breathing in the peppermint. He took it off and said: “Jess, I appreciate the thought but I think I’d rather deal with the stink.” Oops! He was more worried about disease and just ended up doing the job with peppermint tears.
Luckily we had put a bug bomb under the house weeks earlier, so the spiders were at a minimum, even though he came out covered in webs none the less. At first he popped up and said he thought it was the septic tank because there was stagnant water everywhere, but as he crawled around he concluded it was merely rain water that hadn’t absorbed yet. I had been up all night and fell asleep on the back porch and woke up to Rhett crawling out of the house with the what looked like 2 pink dirty diapers in a trash sack: “Jess, the next time we move to Missouri, lets not live in an old, crappy farm house OK?” he said removing the face mask. “I don’t think we’ll ever be moving back to Missouri Rhett.”
He explained he found that the groundhog had broken its way into the ventilation of our house…and given birth right below our bedroom!! The groundhog had a litter of 2 pups, after which Rhett had blocked the mother rodent’s entrance earlier; the babies had obviously died and began rotting. Rhett had to use a mirror to see into the vents and saw the first hairless lump and couldn’t see any more, but just reached in, feeling for more…SO GROSS! Anyway, he got the dead rodent carcasses out of the ventilation system and spent a few hours having to go to Home Depot to buy supplies to clean/ repair the vents under the house. I felt bad because it was the Saturday before finals week and he had been counting on being able to study but ended up having to spend all morning on the rodent control, but I was grateful he was willing to do it and the stench cleared up within an hour.