On a Typical Morning...I am out from work for at least this week because I am supposed to take it easy. I spent last weekend in the hospital with acute diverticulitis and I need to rest my body so it will heal.
Wednesday is my mother's day off. She offered to come over to help me get my house in order since I had been laid up. I called her once I was up and moving.
"It's been a terrible morning so far," she grumbled, "And it's only 9 o'clock."
"What happened?" I asked.
"Your brother went down to the basement at 7 to get laundry to go to school. All of a sudden, he started screaming, 'Mom! Mom, come down here!' So I go down to the basement. And there was some dust on the floor, but then I looked and it was this THING. So I screamed at him, 'Kill it! Kill it!' And he stomped on it."
She continued, "It wasn't a roach; it looked like a little lobster! I think it was a crayfish!"
"Is Peter's crayfish still in his fish tank?" I asked.
"Well, that's what I thought!," she exclaimed, "So I made him look in the fishtank and we couldn't find it. How did it get out?"
"I don't know. Did it jump?"
"I don't know. It was very strange." She paused. "So it wouldn't die. Patrick had to keep stomping it and it finally stopped moving. And then I looked at it close. It had claws like a little lobster."
"Does Peter know he's short the crayfish?," I asked.
"Yeah," She paused a moment. "It was very strange", she said again.
I don't know much about crayfish, so I suppose it is plausible that it could have got out of the tank somehow. But what was even stranger was the phone call later.
"Hello?" I answered the phone.
"The crayfish is still in the fish tank!" my mother exclaimed, without greeting. "That wasn't the crayfish we killed."
"Well, do you think it was a silverfish or something else?"
"No, it was a crayfish," my mother insisted. "It had lobster claws."
"Well, how did a crayfish get into your basement?" I asked. She doesn't live near a stream--we live in the middle of the city. There was no way for a crayfish to hike its way up the gorges of the Genesee River to terrorize my mother in her basement, no matter how determined it was.
"I think it jumped out of Pete's fishpond during the summer and came into the basement." She seemed to give this explanation more to comfort herself than to make sense.
I searched on the Internet while we talked. "Wow, this site says that some crayfish grow to be more than a foot in length," I told her.
"That's it! I'm not going into the basement anymore! If I see a foot-long crayfish, I'll go into cardiac arrest. If you get a call from the hospital, then you'll know."
Obviously, I gave her a fact she didn't want to hear. "Hold on, hold on!" I said, switching to another site, "This site says that some crayfish can live in damp areas, but they don't get too big. Was the basement wet? Was there any puddles?"
My mother sighed. "Of course there was. The basin overflowed a month ago."
"Did you clean it up?" I asked.
"I couldn't get everything. It was too damp."
"Well, that's maybe why there's the crayfish," I suggested.
"That doesn't explain how it got there," she said. "Between the crayfish and the bats, I'm never going into the basement again. This is so strange. It's like the fish with teeth all over again."
