What people who know me well have long warned would happen has, in fact, come to pass. For a moment around 3 the other morning, I was convinced that the loud thump that awakened me was made by a burglar. The doors and windows seemed secure, so it had to be the cat, whose nocturnal mischief had been catastrophic before.

“What are you doing now?” I yelled gruffly. In answer, she peered innocently at me, apparently as unsure as I of the source of the noise that had awakened her. If the cat could have spoken, she quite likely would have said, “Don’t yell it me. I didn’t do it.” As it is, I’m lucky that she didn’t just haul off and scratch or bite me.

I decided not to worry about it. The last time I decided not to worry about what went bump in the night, a fully grown opossum fell into my kitchen. It had ambled across the roof and fallen through the screen covering the open skylight, just barely clearing the gas range and a hutch filled with dishes. When the cat began a low, constant growl, I knew the problem involved something more than a picture that had fallen from the wall when a train rumbled by.

The creature must have weighed 10 pounds. It was ugly, not charming and coy-looking as it appears in the encyclopedia. It was making a ferocious hissing, screeching sound as it bared its razor-sharp teeth at my cat, who was holding her own until I walked into the kitchen and the intruder lumbered into the corner and did what possums do best. The possum was frightened and probably enduring the worst ordeal of its life after having been dropped into civilization, and I clearly had the upper hand. But the idea of a possum in my kitchen at not quite 5 o’clock in the morning was unsettling, and I turned girlie and called the police to see if they took care of that sort of thing. Two officers responded and scooped up the itinerant marsupial in a net and took it outside the city limits to release it.

So, you see, this decision of mine the other morning not to worry about it was not without risks. I have no skylights and no longer live in Fairfield in the original house that Jack built, where an opossum in the kitchen wasn’t, in the larger scheme of things, all that peculiar. It was more clubhouse than a modern home, with a ladder set at about a 70-degree angle leading to two small upstairs bedrooms in which tall people couldn’t stand fully erect. It was a great house, and the fact that I think that pretty much proves I can live anywhere.

Even places where closet rods collapse under the weight of my guilty pleasure, a passion for clothes and an aversion to discarding them when they’re no longer in style or, ahem, no longer fit. As do so many middle-aged women, I cling optimistically to the notion that the size 10 jeans of a few decades ago (before vanity sizing made a 10 the new size 14), might someday zip, even if I have to use a pair of pliers. I still have every pair of jeans I’ve worn since Nixon was president, so that should give you some idea of the volume we’re talking about here.

It was only a matter of time before the closet rod groaned that enough was enough and hurtled the clothes against the wall. The problem was easily solved and I didn’t have to go all girlie to fix it. The possum in the kitchen was a lot more interesting and exciting, though.