Providentially, my husband finished a big project yesterday. I say providentially because last night he came home at 7:30 instead of 11:30. This meant that he was the one who discovered the four-legged furry vector of various viruses under our portable dishwasher.
Did you hear me shriek? I'm sorry if it disrupted your evening. All I can say is I will be grateful to God for a long time to come that Elwood wrapped up his project yesterday, because if I had found that mouse myself on the evening of yet another day of the solo dinner/bedtime gig -- well, I think it might have sent me right over the edge.
Part of me thinks I should be made of sterner stuff. I should be like a pioneer woman, taking out mice with a cast-iron skillet -- whack! -- in between batches of corn pone. Although remember that scene in Little Town on the Prairie when the mouse wakes Pa up in the night, nibbling away at his hair? It's a good thing Ma didn't rely on the cast-iron skillet extermination method, or we would have had Epidural Hematoma on the Prairie and Trepanation by the Shores of Silver Lake.
(We interrupt this post to tell you that there are some powerfully odd people in this world. I was googling to see if there were two n's or three in trepanation and discovered that there is a movement touting trepanation as a route to higher consciousness. "It's safer than LSD!" one says. Personally, I would not expect DIY cranial surgery and higher consciousness to go hand in hand, but I suppose one never knows.)
But back to the subject at hand, which is these creatures who have no higher consciousness but do possess an unerring instinct for pricey comestibles. The last time we had mice they spurned the one-pound bag of bleached white flour but had a party in my bulk-purchased organic grains. I tried hiding my bulk foods in the oven at night while we were working on mouse eradication. Did you know mice can get into your oven easily? My efforts at starving them out resulted only in mouse droppings all over the oven floor. Nothing says home like the smell of roasting rodent excreta.
Last time we tried to trap them before we called in the big guns. This time, remembering the quivering live mice in glue traps and the stiffened-in-their-death-throes mice in spring traps, I wanted to go right to the pros. So I pulled out the phone book. (Let your fingers do the whacking, so to speak.) I called our downstairs neighbor, and sure enough she spotted a mouse yesterday. I called our old landlord and got the name of the exterminator he used. I called our new landlord and explained.
He doesn't want to call an exterminator. He wants me to poison them myself.
I have a two-year-old, though, who hasn't quite learned that pretty blue things on the floor are not for eating, and the warnings on the bait-tray packages alarm me. I am going to look today for tamper-proof containers and single-dose bait cookies, but I am doing it grumpily. I want them dead.
Part of me also wonders if "I want them dead" is inconsistent with the "we are gentle with living things" line that I am forever spouting to my children. Should I say, "We are gentle with living things although we have no qualms about inducing fatal hemorrhages in disease-carrying vermin that invade our pantry"? What would St. Francis do? Did he have feeding stations in his refectory? (Do mendicant friars even have refectories?) (I've seen the humane traps. They give me the heebie-jeebies. Not very Franciscan of me, I suppose.)
I am going now to put my bulk-purchased nuts in the freezer (they can't get into the freezer, can they?) and my big bags of oats and rice in a plastic tub with a tight-fitting lid. I will leave you with the Gladly family's version of Hop on Pop:
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