Goodbye, 2023, and Take Your Mice With You

It’s New Year’s Eve 2023 and I’m unraveling. It’s probably due to Covid. If you’ve had it, you know the symptoms. If you haven’t, I’m not going to gross you out on the last day of the year by describing them. I’ll wait until a more appropriate day. Just know that, as I type these words, I am burning up and freezing simultaneously. I also might be hallucinating.

Over the holiday break, when I was healthy, my son and I watched Candy Cane Lane, starring Eddie Murphy. It was a ridiculous, but fun-to-watch movie. I couldn’t begin to describe everything that happened, but I will tell you about the electronic, 12-layered metal tree based on the song, “The 12 Days of Christmas.” Each level had icons corresponding to the day: i.e., a partridge in a pear tree on the first level, two turtledoves on the second level, etc.

Now, here’s where it gets weird. Due to a disgruntled elf, the icons come alive and wreak havoc and can only be stopped if you yank away the gold rings they all possess. Once you grab a ring, the live icon becomes a 2-dimensional icon. They initially fall to the ground, but they eventually make their way back to the electronic tree.

After everything worked out in the end–as, of course, it did–my son and I agreed that it was a fun movie to watch while gorging on all of the Christmas cookies, crackers, cheeses, and candy that I had stockpiled for such an occasion.

My son went home this past Friday morning and, by Friday night, I experienced the first of my Covid symptoms. My well-being only deteriorated from then on. Last night, Saturday night, drugged up on TheraFlu, I began binge-watching The Gilded Age, with my loyal dog, Duke, on the floor next to me.

At about 4 in the morning, I noticed movement under the Christmas tree. As soon as I turned my head, a small black and white mouse ran out from under the tree and into the bedroom next to the living room. Duke didn’t even look up.

I pulled myself up from the couch and went into the bedroom. I looked around for the mouse but he wasn’t visible in the bedroom or in the attached bathroom. The bottom of the bedroom closet contained mounds of winter clothes from the room’s former resident, my brother, who now lives in Florida.

I figured that the mouse was probably somewhere in that mess, so I did what any of you would have done at almost 5 o’clock in the morning. I left the bedroom, closed the door, and stuffed a large gift bag under the door so that the mouse would be trapped. I figured I’d deal with it today (New Year’s Eve) since it’s a generally accepted custom to rid your home of vermin before the New Year rolls in.

The thing is, I only got a quick look at the mouse. I have never seen a black and white mouse before. I started wondering if it was actually a cat.

This afternoon, after waking up and gulping down some more TheraFlu, I decided to see if I had imagined the mouse, or cat. I cautiously went into the bedroom and pulled out all of the clothes and blankets from the bottom of the closet. No mouse, no cat. I looked in every corner of the room. No mouse, no cat. I checked the bathroom, with the same result. By this point, I had decided it was not a cat, because I surely would have detected a cat in the bedroom or bathroom, despite my drugged-up state.

I recently heard someone referring to the First Law of Thermodynamics. At the time, I thought I understood it as meaning mass can change forms but not disappear. It turns out the law is actually about energy, but I decided to go with my interpretation. If mass can’t disappear, then where was the mouse?

Of course, the mouse was probably still in the room, hiding somewhere clever. I, therefore, closed the door again and stuffed the crack at the bottom with the gift bag I had previously used for that purpose. That gift bag is now part of the decor.

Then, I went to the kitchen and poured myself another TheraFlu cocktail. I took it to the living room, to resume binge-watching The Gilded Age. In my opinion, the show was over-acted and a rip-off of Downton Abbey, but it served the purpose of getting me through a long, uncomfortable night.

As I settled myself on the couch, I glanced over at the Christmas tree, mostly to see if the mouse had re-settled himself under it. He wasn’t visible, but what blew my mind was what was visible. I had never gotten around to hanging ornaments on the tree this year–it had lights and pine cones, that was enough–so I know my eyes popped out of my head when I spotted a single pewter ornament hanging from the lowest branch of the tree. The ornament was a mouse.

Did I, at some point during the long night, grab a ring from the black and white mouse? Did it turn back into an ornament?

I had a decision to make. I could quit taking the TheraFlu and endure awful Covid symptoms, or I could keep taking it and resign myself to living in a fantasy world until I was completely cured.

That was an easy decision. Bottoms up and Happy 2024!

A Mouse in the House … Again

It’s been a while since I’ve had any rodents in my house, or at least any that brought themselves to my attention. If there’s a mouse in the house and you don’t see it, is it really there?

Well, it was really there tonight as I lay sprawled on my sofa watching the Downton Abbey movie. My dog, Duke, was lying next to me when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted movement on the rug. The movement turned out to be a tiny little mouse running across the room. Duke didn’t even stir. I, on the other hand, jumped up and chased the mouse until he escaped under the radiator.

I had some mousetraps in the house, so I lathered them with peanut butter and set them under the radiators. My dog and I settled back down to continue watching the movie, when movement again caught my eye. The mouse was a daredevil, for sure. It ran right past Duke, who didn’t even look up. I grabbed a Solo cup and chased the mouse into a corner. Then I scooped him up (after several tries and a lot of mouse squealing) and took him to the backyard.

My mother always said, “If there’s one mouse, there are always more.” It didn’t take long to prove her right. After I congratulated myself on my heroic capture of an animal the size of my thumb, my dog started sniffing around the stove. The last time one of my dogs did that, we wound up moving into a hotel. So, of course, I expected the worst. I was not disappointed.

I pulled out the bottom drawer of the stove to see if anything was underneath it, and at first, it was all clear. And then I saw what looked like a shadow dash by the baseboard. Years ago, there was a hole in the wall behind the stove from which a rat entered and set up housekeeping. We had long ago sealed that hole, but that was the direction the shadow ran towards.

Of course it was after midnight. It’s always the middle of the night when I discover unpleasant things. I think I’ll start going to bed earlier.

Since I didn’t feel like fighting rodents in the wee hours, I put a mouse trap under the stove and went upstairs. Tomorrow seems soon enough to deal with whatever is back there. All I hope is that the mouse, or mice, stays behind the stove and doesn’t venture upstairs to my bedroom. My mother also always said, “Mice are tricky. They can flatten themselves and slide through the tiniest cracks,” so I stuffed towels under the door.

I also barricaded the door with heavy furniture, which might have been taking things a bit far. My mother never said mice could move furniture, so as long as the cracks under the door are stuffed, I should be fine (knock wood).

Except for my dreams. I’m not looking forward to them. Maybe I’ll just stay up.

Addendum (added 4/29/2022)

My parents had a pantry in the basement when I lived in Ohio as a teen. The pantry consisted of long shelves that ran the length of one wall. One half of the shelving was for food and the other was for toys. One day, my mother noticed a Cheerio next to a dollhouse. She investigated further and discovered that every room in the dollhouse was filled to its ceiling with Cheerios. “We have mice in the basement,” my mother announced at dinner. She described what she had found. I commented that it must’ve taken the mice forever to carry the Cheerios, one by one, across the shelving to the dollhouse and then to fill the rooms. Her response was, “They had the time.”

The Next Best Thing

When I was a kid, and eavesdropping on adult conversations, whenever a new invention or product–anything from felt-tip pens to birth control pills–was discussed, an adult never failed to pipe up, “It’s the next best thing to sliced bread.” Then my father or some other man–never a woman–would say, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will come aknocking.” I’m not sure that the word that was used was actually “aknocking,” but that’s how I remember it.

I was thinking about that today as I cleaned my entire bathroom with disinfecting wipes. They are a brilliant invention and make a mockery of other cleaning products. A mockery, I say. I still squirt toilet cleaner into my toilet because I don’t want to stick my hand in there with a wipe, but other than toilet cleaner, I don’t need anything else besides wipes. They’re the next best thing to sliced bread, I suppose.

I’m not really sure about the accuracy of my comparison, however, because by the time I was born, sliced bread was readily available and not much on the minds of people who bought their bread at the Acme. It was always called “the” Acme by everyone I knew except for my grandfather, Popeye, who called it “the Ac-a-me.”

I can appreciate the invention of sliced bread, though. Before then, it must have been a hassle to have to cut up every loaf of bread you ever bought.  It was probably also a messy job, what with crumbs flying everywhere.

The crumbs would explain the worldwide desire for a better mousetrap. Now I understand the rush to invent the best one, and why all of humanity was lined up and ready to come aknocking.

Two Hundred and Thirty Eight Dollars

It all started in the middle of the night. A bag of bread that was left on our kitchen table when we went to bed was relocated to a kitchen chair and half-eaten when we awoke the next morning. Being the brave rodent hunters that we are, we immediately summoned an exterminator. The guy showed up, said, “You’ve got mice,” put out some bait and said, “That will be $238. You have a four-month guarantee.” Then he told me to plug up areas under the sink with steel wool and ended with, “Call us in a month if you see any more activity.” “Two-hundred and thirty eight dollars for bait?” my husband and I asked each other … after the guy left, of course. We didn’t want to look cheap. “We could have bought bait for a lot less than that,” my husband noted. What made the deal worse was that we were really only getting a three-month guarantee since we had to observe “activity” for a month before calling in reinforcements.

Of course we saw activity during the exterminator’s grace period. I was greeted every morning by black rice-sized excrement that I had to sweep up before I served my son his breakfast (after washing my hands, of course).  One morning, I had to sweep up a dead field mouse. The problem seemed to be over at that point and we all forgot about it. Then, one morning, my husband found a gnawed banana on a dining room chair. The fruit bowl was on the dining room table, so something had dragged it down onto the chair before eating it. Once again, we called the exterminator. A different guy showed up this time—their “wildlife expert”—and he told us that we still had mice, and that he had seen “activity” in the basement. So, he re-baited the traps. He then pointed out additional gaps that I had to fill.  He told me that steel wool wasn’t good enough and that I had to buy foam insulation that turned hard once it was sprayed into crevices, and that I had to fill every hole with it. I told my husband what he said and my husband asked why we had to do the work when we were paying the exterminating company. I told him that the exterminator obviously had his limits as to what he would do for the paltry sum of $238. Then I headed out to buy the foam insulation. The next day, despite the insulation, the invader had taken an apple from the fruit bowl in the dining room and had carried it into the kitchen, where it nibbled on it under the kitchen cabinets. When my husband asked why in the world I had left anything edible out, I told him we were trapping an animal, and this particular animal liked fruit, so of course I would leave fruit out.  He just shook his head and threw out the fruit that was still left in the fruit bowl.

Later that day, on a walk with our dog, I spotted a cache of acorns at the base of an oak tree. I scooped up about thirty or forty and put them in a bag for my friend who likes acorns. When I got home, I put the bag on the dining room table. The next morning, the acorns were gone. The bag was still there, ripped to shreds, but the nuts were nowhere to be found. My husband and son claimed that they knew nothing about the acorns and even insinuated that the acorns were never there in the first place. If it weren’t for the ripped-up bag, I might have believed them. Later that night, the dog started sniffing around the base of the stove. I peered under the stove and saw an acorn. I knew that whatever happened next wasn’t going to be good. My husband had the good fortune to be at work, so my son and I pulled out the stove. What we saw was horrifying: a real-live rat’s nest. A huge collection of insulation, steel wool, and piles of acorns, dog food, and excrement. And a measuring cup, a stick of gum, and a Frisbee. It was like the Borrowers had moved in. As we stared in horror at the mess—while holding the stove in mid-air—the mess moved. Slowly, a very large, very black rat emerged from the piles. We almost dropped the stove. Then the rat ambled over to a hole behind the stove and disappeared. The rest happened in a blur. We pulled the stove all the way out and started cleaning up the nest. After a large trash bag was filled with the detritus, we had to clean up the hole, which was crammed with acorns and steel wool, which made us wonder how the rat had gotten through the hole in the first place. Then the scouring and disinfecting began. It was a truly horrendous experience.

The next day, the head exterminator came and pulled out all the stops. He apologized for his team’s botching of the job and told us that he wouldn’t charge us the rat extermination fee. Apparently the $238 only covered putting out mice bait and making us do all the grunt work. He put out spring traps that could catch a horse and told us to call him after the weekend was over. We were supposed to, once again, observe “activity,” and if necessary, “finish the rat off” with a hammer if he got caught in a trap and didn’t die. The hell with that. We put the dog in the kennel, packed bags, and moved into a hotel. The rat won. He could have the house.

On Monday morning, after dropping our son off at school, we called the head exterminator and told him that we’d meet him at our home. We all crept into the kitchen, not knowing what we would encounter. Thankfully, the rat had met his maker, down in the basement. The exterminator offered to show us the dead object of our terror. I declined, but my husband reasoned that it couldn’t bother us now, so he looked. He later told me that the rat was bigger than his foot. After disposing of the rat (he refused to nail the dead rat to a post to discourage other rats from venturing inside our house), the exterminator returned and re-set traps. We were also told that we needed to have a “cement guy” reinforce our foundation so that nothing else could venture inside.

Wouldn’t you think that we would have done that immediately? Nah, spring seems soon enough. We still have a few months left on our four-month guarantee. We want to get our 238 dollars’ worth.