Possum Magic

When my daughter Lily was two and her brother four, we moved into a new house – or an old house, as Lily would say. It had belonged to a hoarder and it took a lot of work just getting it to a state that was liveable. However, the location was perfect, in a leafy area of Sydney that backed onto a bush reserve. As we discovered pretty soon, possums, both brushtails and ringtails, had been calling this place home for a long time.

A few weeks after moving in, I woke to the sound of someone in our living room. I shook my husband awake and whispered, “I think someone is in the house.” We crept out but all was quiet. The next day I found every piece of fruit in the fruit bowl had a little bite taken out of it.

Many nights we were woken in the wee hours of the morning when our resident possum would come home drunk on blossom nectar. Crashing into anything and everything lying about, he would fumble his way into the cavity between the ceiling and floorboards of the double storey. And if another possum decided to move in, which they did on a regular basis, all hell would break loose; screaming and chasing each other under the floorboards of our bedroom until the intruder fled.

But the funniest night was when a brushtail climbed through the kids’ bedroom window, waking my daughter, who, although she’d had a fright, was more amused than scared. We ran into the kids’ room, but the possum escaped through our legs into the room next door. It saw a window and decided it could leap through. However, it hadn’t reckoned on the toilet seat being up, and it landed in the bowl with a splash. The poor possum was frantic. We were rolling about with laughter. Dripping wet it ran and hid. To lure it outside, we left a banana and peanut butter by the back door. The next morning the food and possum were gone.