Jelly & Beer

As I stepped on to mom's front porch--exhausted after a nine-hour drive--I saw the raccoon catcher baited with grape jelly and beer. I didn't think twice about it. Until later. Do raccoons like canned domestic beer? Would they prefer it  bottled and imported? And what about grape as a jelly choice? If I eat grape jelly, it's with peanut butter.  I don't eat my jelly with beer or drink my beer with jelly.

But what do I know? Mom understands raccoons. At one time, she had three of them living with her as invited house guests. While Moss-Coon and Tonto were confined to the screened back porch, the most senior raccoon Zolone romped through the house. He swung from door knobs, pulled pots and pans out of cabinets, tossed down illicit aspirins like candy, rinsed wrist-watches in toilets, annoyed cats and ran his saucy little paws through the sugar in the sugar bowl--which pretty much made it "his sugar."

It took Mom two solid years to get Zolone and his companions out of the house and into the wild. In fact, she found it easier to send Sis to college a semester early than to unwedge the raccoons from their cozy digs.

But that was long ago. Mom has grown wiser. No more falling for cute bandit-masked raccoon babies. No more warning visitors away from the sugar bowl. The current raccoon trap, she says, is set strictly to resettle raccoons who eat cat food while lazy cats nap.

While I visited, Mom took a break from baiting the trap. After I returned home, Mom resumed her beer and jelly baiting. She caught an opossum. It took the dim-witted creature about 100 tooth punches to guzzle three cans of beer. There was no sign left of the grape jelly. Mom called Bro to remove the hapless drunk so she could restock with beer and jelly. Bro, too, knows better than to think too hard about her beer and jelly system.

After all, Mom cut her teeth on critters. And if she says beer and jelly catch critters, she's probably got reason to think it. Before there were raccoons in the house, Mom had an opossum as her childhood pet, a dairy cow to milk and a goat-pulled cart to collect the mail. When she was a teenager, there was an incident of kid goats turned loose in the house while her parents weren't home. She credits her brothers with the crime. But I know she enjoyed it--perhaps as much as the opossum enjoyed the beer and  jelly spread.