L U N A T A L K with Eva Moon

The Trash Burglars

June 25, 2010 on 5:53 pm | Join the conversation. You know you want to. | In General Musing

My friend, Irene fretted about it all day.

I’d asked her to look in on our cats and house while we were away on vacation. She’d meant to come Wednesday, but wasn’t feeling well. Then Thursday got away from her. Finally her friend, Steve, couldn’t stand the pacing any more. “Irene, let’s just go over there tonight after I get back from the gym and we’ll take care of everything.”

“That was fine with me,” she told me later (imagine all this in a charming Ukrainian accent). “I am a night person, so I don’t care if it’s late.”

So that is how they ended up letting themselves into our house at 1:00 am this morning.

Not realizing that we’re going on vacation NEXT week.

While we slumbered on, oblivious, they turned on lights, changed the cats’ water and litter, chatted, poked at my piano and generally wandered about the place. Steve volunteered to vacuum. Irene nixed that. Thankfully.

Then they decided to take out the trash for us. Steve pulled the garbage bag out of the kitchen and Irene went upstairs to collect trash from the rest of the house. In a true life Goldilocks moment she approached our bedroom and realized someone had been sleeping in that bed… AND THEY WERE STILL THERE. Or as she put it “I saw the body.”

She ran downstairs in a panic. “Steve!” she whispered frantically, “They’re IN THE HOUSE!” Both totally freaked out, running around, desperately trying to turn off lights and remember what they might have moved. In the end lights were left on and they bolted, imagining how it would look if our neighbors were up to see two people furtively fleeing our house, one of them carrying a big sack.

The burglars got away with the loot, hyperventilating but undetected.

I can’t believe we slept through it. I’m really glad we did. Though explaining it all to the police would have made such amusing amusing chapter two.