Mission Im-’possum-ble

Every now and then an experience comes along that makes you question traditional parental wisdom. One such experience presented itself during a car ride with my mother-in-law early in my marriage.

After a day-trip to Pennsylvania to visit relatives, my husband, his mom, his sister, our baby and I were headed home. The weather in the Tompkins/Cortland County areas had turned nasty while we were gone. Hubby drove, his mother rode shotgun, I sat behind him, my sister-in-law sat behind her mom, and the baby was tucked into his infant car seat between Nancy and me.

“Oh, my goodness,” Mom said. “It’s getting terrible out, isn’t it?”

After several refrains of the mantra, my husband responded through gritted teeth.

“It’s not that bad,” he said.

Detecting he wanted to add “…and if you stop saying that, you might live through the drive…,” I gave him my best ‘be-nice-that’s-your-mother-you’re-speaking-to’ knee in the back. We were creeping along a tree-lined mountain road, cliff to the right of us, mountain to the left, when we rounded a bend and felt more than heard the two thumps.

“Oh, I can’t believe we hit it!” Mom said.

“Hit what?” I asked.

“What did you want me to do?” hubby asked his mom. “Swerve off the road or risk hitting someone head on?”

“Well, no, I guess not,” she said.

“Hit what?” I asked.

“An opossum,” hubby said.

As I was conjuring up the worst possible road-kill scenarios, Mom spoke.

“Well, you are going to go back there and take it out of the road before it makes a mess, aren’t you?” she asked her son.

I never realized she had a death wish.

“I need to find a safe place to turn around,” he hissed.

I concluded I had married into a family of lunatics. I wanted to get home. We’d been in the car - WITH A BABY - for what felt like eons, and these nuts were talking about turning around. We returned wwwaaayyy past where the incident had occurred to find nothing in the road because we had to find another safe place to turn around toward home again.

We were all silent as we approached the bend and the scene of the crime again. Suddenly, there it was, right in the middle of the road.

“Be careful,” I said, images of oncoming cars careening out of control and premature widowdom looming in my head.

Thinking he would pull over and get out of the car, imagine my astonishment when he pulled up alongside the critter and opened his door. I should probably mention at this point that said vehicle was a Toyota Celica. Two-door. So when that huge door swung open, there we were, eye-to-eyelids with the little guy. Hubby, apparently thinking he could remove said beast from the roadway without leaving the car, reached out to push it out of the driving lane.

The opossum, reared up, hissing, slashing and teeth gnashing. Hubby jerked himself back into the car and stared in astonishment (think ‘deer-in-the-headlights’) at the rodent now standing about six feet, 13 inches tall. Pandemonium broke out. I was frantically trying to grab my baby and crawl over my sister-in-law who was trying to crawl over her mother out the passenger side of the car.

“Shut the door!”

“AAAAaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggghhhhhh!!!!!”

“Oh, my goodness! Oh, my goodness!”

Hubby slammed the door and just about doubled over in laughter. We took off down the road, our hearts in our throats, eventually arriving at home in relatively the same condition in which we’d left, leaving us to ponder the evening’s events. I decided the ordeal was a learning experience. I learned my mother-in-law was off her rocker and that “playin’ ‘possum” ain’t just a catchy phrase.

Reprinted courtesy Eagle Newspapers, Syracuse.