Chipmunks in the duct work...

Chipmunks in the duct work...

I woke up about 3 o'clock this morning thinking about chipmunks in the heating ducts.

Ten, maybe fifteen, years ago I stopped over at my folks' house one evening and in the course of the conversation they told me they had chipmunks in the cold air return at the end of the hallway. They could hear them every night squeaking away up there. This had been going on for several days. We discussed calling an exterminator, because, as you can imagine, one wouldn't want a critter to get stuck up there and die leaving behind a smelly legacy.

A week or two later I stopped in again and got the rest of the story. I think the word sheepish was coined to describe the look on my dad's face when he explained that it hadn't been chipmunks after all... it was the low battery alarm on the smoke detector.

By 4am I realized that my chipmunks weren't going away, which is why if you had peered in my window at 4:03 you would have seen me up a ladder in my dining room changing the battery in the smoke alarm. They left me in peace after that.