Every few nights since I got back to Florida, I’ve been hovering in that pleasant space just above sleep when I’ve been jolted awake by a sound.  The sound of tiny feet scampering across the roof.

I considered a number of increasingly dire possibilities as to the cause.  A freakishly nocturnal squirrel?  An unusually lively iguana?  A giant cockroach?  (Wait.  They’re all giant here, no matter what cutesy name we decide to call them.  “Palmetto bugs?” Oh, please.)   But after considering all the options, I decided that it’s most likely a fruit rat.

Fruit rats are exciting little creatures.  They actually like to climb and nest in trees.  Then they like to drop out of them into your garbage cans and have a whale of a time if these aren’t covered properly.  It must be like the rat equivalent of an eccentrically-filled swimming pool.  The little guys also have a less-than-endearing tendency to bite a hole in the skin of any fruit on a tree and then eat the innards, scampering away and leaving just the rind.  We don’t have any fruit trees, though, and our garbage is kept in a fortresslike contraption, so I can’t imagine what is drawing them to our house. 

I described the nocturnal scampering to my father and he said that he’d also been hearing it of an evening lately.  We decided to take the most steadfast and clearest course of action available to us, and do absolutely nothing about it.