Poor Baby!

Soupy was so tiny when I brought him home, I didn't see how he could possibly be any bother. Right!

I fed him and set my clock for a couple of hours hence, to feed him again. Then I put him in a warm box with lots of rags to cuddle in. I put the box in the shower stall - just in case he got out and had to do his business. More rags in the shower, so if he left the box, he could find another place to cuddle. I closed the glass doors on the shower and went to bed confident he could get into no trouble.

When I went back for his first feeding, he was in the box, snug as a bug. Next feeding, same thing.

Then came morning. I went to his box, expecting to find a toasty warm possum, possibly with a little mess in the box. What I found was an empty box. And an empty shower stall. And as far as I could tell, an empty bathroom.

Panic!

I checked every nook and cranny in the bathroom for possible escape routes. Nothing. I screamed for help. Dee came running. We searched the house. But Soupy was obviously gone. I was in tears. Of course, I was checking close to the floor. He was a baby. How could he possibly be up high?

Never underestimate a possum, regardless of how young. I stood in the bathroom and turned in a circle. Suddenly I was eye to eye with Soupy, peering out at me from the towel  shelf over the commode.

There was no way out of the shower stall except to shimmy the thin rubber gasket around the door. Then do a balancing act across the slick aluminum top of the shower door frame to the rough cedar bathroom door frame. Across about two feet of sheet-rocked wall and onto the shelf. Hey . . . I don't know. He was a regular Houdini.

I started putting his box on it's side, in the bathroom, with the commode lid down (so he wouldn't flush himself) and the shower door open. He decided the shower stall was his bathroom. We laid newspapers in it at night and Voila! he was potty trained. Never slipped up. Ever.

So, we gave him the run of the house at night. Not really a good idea! But possums like to poke around at night and sleep though the day. So we gave it a try. What harm could he do? <G> We "Soupy-proofed" the house each night at bedtime.

One night we heard a thump. He was in front of the dryer when we ran into the laundry room - and limping. I'd made the mistake of putting a tall basket of dirty clothes next to the dryer. The best we could figure was; he'd climbed up the basket to the top of the dryer, tried to go back down the slick front of the dryer . . . and plunged to the floor.

Imagine how guilty I felt when his limp didn't go away. I took him to the vet where an x-ray revealed he had a broken leg. I'm telling you all this to my shame, because had he not been so doggone cute, and had I not been such a mushy-hearted fool, I'd have built an outdoor cage for him and tried harder to not imprint him. That's why it's not a good idea to try to raise one. Even the best intentioned person - if they are tenderhearted and uneducated on the species - will probably go wrong.

Fortunately, I lived in a state where it was legal to harbor possums, so I was able to find a vet with "possum-experience". It cost hundreds of dollars to have his leg operated on and set. And there was a five-week period when he had to wear a cast on his leg. I started hearing horror stories from every direction about wild animals who'd chewed their own leg off to escape a cast. SO - for five weeks, I slept on the floor with my hand in his "cave" so I'd know if he started chewing. Not my favorite five weeks!

And, we bonded. Oh, did we bond.

In the wild, possums are loners. They don't live in families, except for the female and her young, and then only until they're able to go off on their own.

Unlike dogs and cats, possum mamas don't worry a lot about their young. Mama says to the kids, "Keep up, because if you get lost, I'm not coming to look for you." Which might be why people are constantly finding orphaned possums.

So now you know why I ended up raising my second possum to adulthood and beyond. Soupy led a pretty good life -  by possum standards.

Next week I'm going to tell you about Soupy's play dates! If you think all possums look alike, you're in for a surprise!