So the other day I faced quite an interesting quandary.

You know how some people think that we’re here on this earth to learn lessons? Well apparently one of my lessons is Learning How To Take Care Of Things Myself When My Husband Is Gone.

That’s fine when it is something like, hm, I wonder why we’ve lost power in these back 3 rooms but the electricity is still functioning in the rest of the house or, hm, the washing machine seems to be seeping out some kind of sticky brown goo. But I’m really not okay with this when the lessons involve insects, rodents, or reptiles. Because, as was clearly stated in our marriage agreement, my husband is The Person In Charge Of Creepy Crawly Critters. Not. Me.

But on this day I was at one end of the house when I heard a noise coming from the other end that could only mean one of two things: Either a bird had flown into our front window, or Tigger had captured something on the screened-in porch. I forgot about it for a while, until the moment I realized that I had not seen Tigger all afternoon because he’d been camped out in front of the guest bathroom door. So that kind of ruled out the bird option.

At this point, knowing that my husband would not be home for another three days, I had to take stock of all my choices.

I could ignore it completely and pretend that the guest bathroom did not even exist until such time as my husband returned home. I could be courageous and face whatever was on the other side of that door myself. Or, I could risk looking really stupid, and ask someone else to come and look in my bathroom for me.

The teeny tiny part of my brain that was functioning rationally was telling me that there was only a little space open under the door, so even if something had crawled in the bathroom it couldn’t be really big or very scary. But the rest of my brain, the part that was still reeling from the close encounter with the snake, was telling the other part to just shut the *&%# up already!

In the end I decided to take the risk of looking like an idiot, and I asked our next door neighbor to come over. (I learned something very interesting about myself in that moment, as apparently for me the fear of looking stupid is much less horrible than the fear of facing severed limbs.) He did, and slowly opened the bathroom door to find…absolutely nothing, which in my mind only highlighted just what a weenie I was. But he was nice, and caulked up the holes under the sink, and everything was just fine.

Until about 15 minutes ago when, as I was innocently passing through our living room, I found the limbs. And some other stuff too.

And as I shared this gruesome discovery with someone on the phone, she was trying really hard to help me look on the bright side.

“Well, it’s good, because you know your cats are really fast.”

This is true. However when I imagined the ideal qualities of the other beings with whom I share my house, “speed at dismembering other living creatures” was never at the top of my list.