“Call the power company,” he said, still rubbing his hand. He left shaking his head.

Inside the house, the smell of electrical smoke hung thick. A gray haze drifted through the house.

When the power guys got there and looked things over they told me squirrels had chewed through the electrical wires that grounded the house, and the power had been grounded through the cable box. When the cable guy had tried to unscrew the bolt, the power tried to surge through him.

They spent a few hours on a cold Sunday afternoon running new lines to the house, trimming tree limbs, and cursing squirrels.

“Squirrels will chew through anything,” the older of the two told me. He wore a brown coverall and a green hat. His hair was white beneath the hat, and his hands were large and red, with big knuckles. “Fucking tree rats,” he said, as if a squirrel had once injured a family member or bitten a small child in his neighborhood.

I did not consider shooting the possum. After initially scaring me, it had not done anything other than wander around the back yard on certain nights, pulling itself slowly through the grass, running away if I scared it.

“Are you sure it wasn’t a possum?” I said.

They looked at me as if I were daft.

“Possums don’t do anything,” the younger one said, looking at me from atop a ladder leaned against the side of the house, his hands full of wires. “Maybe shit under your house.” He went back to stringing wire. “It was a squirrel.”

“It’s always a squirrel,” the older one said. He cracked his knuckles. I thought of arthritis. “I’ve seen them chew through live wires. They eat the protective covering on the wires, then, sometimes, chew the wire itself to file their teeth.”

“How do I keep them from doing it again?” I asked.

The older one looked around, as if to see if anyone else was listening.

“I’d kill every last one of them,” he said. “Shoot the fuckers in the head, if I were you.”

I did not consider shooting the possum. After initially scaring me, it had not done anything other than wander around the back yard on certain nights, pulling itself slowly through the grass, running away if I scared it. I was still not used to having a wild animal living in the crawl spaces beneath the house, but as long as it didn’t come up the basement stairs and somehow open the door, I thought I could live with it.

I considered naming it, but did not know what an appropriate name for a possum would be: Cornelius? Napoleon? Nitroglycerin?

My daughters never named our cat. When we first got her they kicked names around for a few days, throwing out Princess and Fluffy and Beauregard, shooting down my offers of Attila and Cheesefries and Agamemnon. We finally settled on Kitty, which was what we had been calling her since we got her, and which satisfied me because I like the movie “Big Jake” where John Wayne has a dog named “Dog.”

One night I woke to find Kitty clawing and scratching at the door, her back up, making that weird growl-whine noise cats make when they are mad or scared or both. I turned on the porch light and looked out to see the possum sitting on the porch steps. Kitty had turned feral, spitting and scratching, her eyes as wild as I have ever seen them, and I wondered then how cats are any different from possums or squirrels or raccoons, other than the thousands of years of domestication, which then led me to wonder about our fear of small furry things that do not belong to the cat family. Why will we feed a stray cat but not a stray possum? And why, when I see a stray cat in the neighborhood, I do not think first of rabies, as I do with possums, and raccoons, and squirrels, although, as I have pointed out, squirrels do not necessarily need rabies to kill the cable guy.