Of cats and rats

Now let me preface this post by saying that I grew up in the suburbs. I understand that the city, in many ways, would have a hard time existing without the suburbs and vice versa. To each their own. But this is just funny.

So a few weeks ago, I was helping out at the Day House Catholic Worker with a big high school youth group from a very very wealthy suburb of Detroit. They had come to help do some cleanup in the neighborhood and at a local church. Their youth group leader was pretty great; he had decided to implement some "simple living and solidarity" rules including limited showers, PBandJ lunches, no accepting treats, every one at every work site got the same food, work hours, etc. No revolution, but it was obvious that it was definitely stretching some of the kids. So Jeff (a catholic worker) and I were the "detroit reps" for the week, coming up with projects and facilitating the work. It was a great week and we accomplished quite a bit.

On the last day of the week, some of the kids were using the bathroom at the Catholic worker and one accidentally shut herself into the bathroom with Tiger, the cat. Tiger, apparently a little freaked out by the incident, reacted as a cat and bit her. Tiger has lived at the house for years and has never bitten anyone, even with all of the chaos of a Catholic Worker. Long story short, the parents of the youth group freaked out, sent animal control, and Tiger eventually had to spend 10 days in quarantine before being given away to a new home. Now I'm going to go ahead and guess that if a house cat from Rochester Hills had gotten spooked and bitten someone, the fear level may have been a little different. But all cats in Detroit have rabies, obviously. All in all, pretty funny. Understandable, but still slightly ridiculous.

Today, I was working with a different group of teens. This group was from the Greening of Detroit and has been spending their summer helping with reforestation, eliminating invasives, making fallen timber benches, etc. Pretty cool work. The students are definitely punks, though. I mean that in an endearing way. My friend Anna is one of the leaders of a group of 10 of these students and brought them over to our house so I could talk a little bit about urban farming and show them our garden. They were pretty great. A little hard to keep their attention, but they were definitely listening and asking questions. Plus its always fun to hand people fresh mint without telling them what it is until it starts burning their tongue like "an altoid on crack."

Anyhow, just as they were leaving I was explaining to them our compost system. I opened the lid and what did I find? This giant dead rat.

I was pretty horrified. Less by the rat and more by the thought of 10 high school students freaking out and writing me off as the crazy lady who composts rats. But, unlike the cat incident, these high schoolers were entirely unfazed. One even asked me if I wanted her to get it out for me. She said something along the lines of " I guess there really isnt a better place for a rat to die than in a giant pile of food trash. He was probably happy."

Now, I'm not romanticizing city life over suburban or making any quality judgments. A healthy fear of rabies and rats is probably good, no matter who has it. But the contrast was pretty entertaining. Tiger ends up being evicted from the Catholic Worker and this giant dead rat was hardly given notice.