Cheryl, our local animal control officer who takes care of rescued opossums -- a girl and a boy -- usually raises babies through the summer. She keeps them in a cage in a barn at the local animal shelter. (We are not allowed to visit this place.) Then at about the end of September, Cheryl releases the opossums in a remote forest area where there are a lot of berries.
Zosia and I had rescued two baby opossums and turned them over to Cheryl in June. We kept in touch with Cheryl, and she informed us that one of the babies, the girl, died. In August, Cheryl did us a wonderful favor by bringing our surviving boy opossum back to our home for a visit.
We continued to keep in touch with Cheryl, and in September she informed us that our baby opossum was growing slowly and perhaps would not reach a sufficient size to be released at the end of September. We were dismayed that our opossum was growing slowly, but Zosia was delighted that our boy would be allowed to continue living in the animal shelter's barn.
In mid-October, Cheryl's boss (a veterinarian) at the animal shelter decided to keep our opossum through the winter. Cheryl brought the opossum to visit us again before the weather became too cold. On the happy day of this visit, Cheryl drove up and parked her truck in front of our home.
Cheryl had our opossum in a cage in the back of the truck. Cheryl does not like to take any unnecessary risks with her animals, so she hoped that Zosia and I would be satisfied by merely loooking at our opossum right there in the cage in the truck.
Fortunately, however, Cheryl was no match for Zosia, who begged her to bring the cage into our home so that we could leisurely look at our opossum in a more open area with better light. Eventually Cheryl gave in to Zosia's pleading and brought the cage into our home and opened the cage's door so that we enjoy an unobstructed view.
We all were somewhat concerned that our opossum might dash out of the cage into our living room, and so Zosia then convinced Cheryl that we should move our opossum out of his cage into a plastic, laundry tub with high walls. (This was the same laundry tub where we had kept both infant opossums in our home before Cheryl had come to get them from us in June.)
Zosia and I both fell in love all over again with our baby opossum! He was ultra cute!!
I thought he was much bigger than he had been in August, but Cheryl said that he should be approaching adult size. He now was about the size of a fat guinea pig. He still was much smaller than his mother, who had been bigger than a cat, about the size of a small dog.
Zosia thought he had not grown at all since August. She still considers him to be a baby. Whenever she talks about him with me, she always calls him "our baby." I always object: "He's not a baby any more!", but she insists that he is. (We always had this very same conversation about our guinea pigs.)
I asked Cheryl a lot of questions about her life. When she was a young woman, she had aspired to become a doctor. She was not able to get accepted into a medical school, so she taught herself Spanish (which she never had spoken or studied previously) and got accepted into a medical school in Mexico. She studied there for several years and graduated. When she returned from Mexico to the United States, she still did not have the necessary certificates to begin practicing medicine here, but she was determined to take the necessary tests to obtain them.
Then, however, Cheryl began showing symptoms of a rare disease that affects her bones. I don't remember the name or symptoms of this disease, but her bones and joints grow crooked or something. (She does walk and move strangely.) Since this disease is very rare, several years passed until her symptoms developed enough and she visited enough specialists that her disease was diagnosed and treated correctly. In the meantime, she suffered a lot of physical tiredness and weakening. Because of these problems, she did not have the energy to complete her medical studies in the USA and she had to abandon her dream of becoming a doctor.
She got married and settled into an ordinary, non-professional job. One day while she was home and watching television, she was watching some show about animals and she saw a television advertisement about a local vocational school that offered courses to certify for various professions, one of which was "animal control officer." She immediately decided to enroll in such a course, and her husband supported her decision.
She soon discovered, however, that there is a long waiting list to enroll in the animal-control course. She put herself on the waiting list, and in the meantime she began to work at a local animal shelter as a volunteer. Because of her medical training and her volunteer work, she moved up the waiting list faster than most other applicants and finally was able to enroll after waiting about a year.
The animal-control course lasted about a year, and she graduated and received a certificate to work as an animal-control officer. Unfortunately, however, there were no openings in New Jersey. There are very few such jobs, and a position becomes open only when an employed animal-control officer retires or dies. Cheryl therefore continued working as a volunteer, with her husband's support, for another year until a position did become open, and then she was hired.
Since then, for the past five years, she has been working full-time as an animal-control officer for the Bergen County government here in New Jersey. She loves her job.
Every work day, she drives her truck all around Bergen County, responding to phone calls from citizens who need help controlling or rescuing animals. She has dealt with all kinds of animals, from mice to cows. She specializes, however, in rabbits, racoons, opossums, and other such large rodents. Her work involves a lot of running and chasing and grabbing, which is difficult for her because of her physical disease, but she manages to do her work nevertheless.
After spending about a half hour looking at our opossum (Zosia: our BABY), and talking with Cheryl and drinking some lemonade, it was time for our visit to end. We all cooperated to move our opossum from the laundry tub back into his cage, and then I carried the cage as we accompanied Cheryl back out to her truck. I put the cage back into her truck. We posed for some photographs, and then Cheryl drove her truck away until her next visit. She has promised to visit one more time before she releases our opossum into the wild.
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