I have a critter problem.

The specific variety of critter that’s troubling me? I don’t know.

I know only its aftereffects, the holes bitten in our trash cans and the smallish, slightly oblong droppings the villain leaves behind.

It’s tough to identify the culprit because our backyard is a veritable menagerie of suburban wildlife, playing home to squirrels (both black and brown), skunks (and/or neighbors experimenting with newly legalized recreational substances), outdoor cats (enough to drive Jonathan Franzen insane), procreating rabbits (at least one of whom dug such a deep a hole for her young that there’s now a sinkhole in the grass) and possums or opossums (I don’t know the difference). We’ve even seen coyotes nearby.

“What’s eating our trash cans?” I asked the exterminator, also known as my husband.

“A squirrel or something,” he said with a shrug.

He doesn’t care, I thought with shock. Then I realized that he can’t care. Because if he cares, it becomes his problem. He’s had to deal with mouse problems and squirrel problems and ant problems, and wherever there’s a critter problem, the solution often leads to a “disposing of a dead critter” problem, from which he quite naturally recoils. It became clear that, until I’d been thoroughly and properly vanquished, the garbage cans would be my issue.

As a gesture of goodwill, my husband suggested buying wolf urine and putting it everywhere in the backyard.

“Where on earth do I get wolf urine?”

“Online,” he answered.

Of course.

Feeling that the handling and indiscriminate spraying of noxious predator urine was perhaps barely an improvement on the status quo, I called the trash company and told them we needed new cans because ours were being slowly devoured. Did they have any ideas?

“Use bitter apple!” the man on the phone suggested.

I dutifully purchased and applied the bitter apple spray, liberally coating the tops and sides of the cans and reapplying after every rain shower. It worked about as well as the marigolds I bought to keep the critters from eating my garden.

“They ate the marigolds!” I complained to everyone who asked how I was, having just spent $25 and two hours on providing the creatures with a buffet of plants that I’m told taste vaguely onion-y.

And the garbage perpetrator or perpetrators remain unnamed.

Maybe our trash cans, like the garden before it, have become a favorite dining spot for all the neighborhood vermin.

“Have you been to Chez Garvey lately, Bill?” a squirrel asks the skunk across the street. “They’re using this new bitter apple flavor in the pizza crusts that’s simply divine!”

Then, the other night, I came home to encounter in the driveway near the garbage a — well, let’s just call it a possum, a singularly vile creature the size of a small dog. Lit by my headlights’ glare, it stared at me with ghoulish white eyes.

I eased by slowly, giving it plenty of time to scurry away.

But when I got out of the car and turned toward the house, there it was, in the same spot, baldly regarding me with the unearned confidence of a teenage boy behind a car’s steering wheel.

“Get going!” I said, bewildered at its lack of fear.

It sighed deeply, then gave me a look of disdain as it reluctantly lumbered away. I have never been treated to such naked contempt by a being over which I ostensibly held the power of life and death.

“Yeah, I see you, lady,” he seemed to say as he slowly, slowly, slowly made his way to our neighbor’s backyard.

Much more afraid of him than he was of me, I ran past where he’d been and went inside. I’d cracked the case! I threw my keys down and yelled to my husband:

“It’s a possum!”

“What’s a possum?”

“The thing eating our garbage cans!”

There was a long pause from the living room.

Eventually, I heard him answer, quietly but redolent with the sound of defeat:

“Did you try the wolf urine yet?”

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

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