I’ve always thought raccoons were cute little fur balls. From time to time in my life I’ve seen them close to the house. Once while my Mom was canning apricots she put the apricots that hadn’t been done yet on the patio. As my brother’s and I watched T.V. that night, we were amazed that the raccoons came right up to the sliding glass door and where eating the apricots. Brazen! They weren’t the slightest bit shy about being so visible to us. I was amazed by that.

One year when my darlin was the scout master in our ward, he and all the scouts and other leaders were at scout camp. They were gone for a week. Sometime in that week we started hearing noise in the vicinity of the fireplace. I knew something was in there, but what I didn’t know. When my hubby got home I told him. He checked in the chimney, and sure enough there were baby raccoons, and a mama! Not a good thing. We tried for days to encourage them out, and nothing would work. Finally after a week or so, we started smelling something strange. My darlin checked in the chimney, and found the mama and one of the babies had died. Ouch! We needed to get them out of there, but how. If we didn’t get them out soon, the house, and all around it was going to stink. We might have to move out. After many attempts at pulling them out the top of the chimney, hubby finally had to pulled them out the bottom, which meant they came through the house. You can imagine the mess. We almost had to call one of the disaster clean up services. Not quite, but I wanted to. There was quite a mess around the fireplace, and I cleaned and cleaned. After the cleaning, we covered the chimney with a special cover. I don’t ever want to have that experience again.

Raccoons are super cute, only if they don’t die in your chimney!