Monday, January 22, 2007
Hickory Dickory Dock...
Several nights ago I had a bad dream involving a rattlesnake. When I awoke at 3 a.m., I heard noises. Overhead. Coming from the attic. First there was scratching (which my groggy subconscious could easily have mistaken for a rattle). Then there was squeaking. Then rustling and skittering and thumping like small animals doing a floor exercise in our rafters.
Last week's cold snap had all of the neighborhood rodents looking for a fireplace, a down comforter and a hot toddy. And evidently they're like homing pigeons--once they've got the map to your place, they just keep coming baaaaack.
In the morning I called the nice pest control people. They were due out this afternoon.
Yesterday morning, as I was getting ready to make breakfast, I noticed that our guests hadn't been content with the upstairs accomodations. Or maybe they just got the munchies in the middle of the night.
Because they'd made their way into our kitchen, where they'd left (ahem) evidence of their visit. On our stove. I'm teetering on the brink of Too Much Information here, but I'll just add one other salient point: the evidence suggested that we weren't dealing with your run-of-the-mill field mouse here. Nooooooooo. That would be too simple. Too tolerable. Too pleasant.
What we've got on our hands...no, thankfully, not our hands...what we've got in our midst is one...no, way more than one...several....I'm having a really hard time expressing this without resorting to expletives that I abandoned more than a decade ago...VERY BIG , NASTY, DISGUSTING NOCTURNAL ANIMALS THAT LIKE TO CARRY THE BUBONIC PLAGUE. Living in our house. With us.
After I finished screaming, I spent the next four hours disassembling the Viking range right down to the tubing and scrubbing every square inch of it with soap and bleach and a wire brush.
And I still may never cook on it again.
Anyhoo, I explained to the kids that we had unwanted visitors. Mice, maybe, or rats. That they could not, under any circumstances, sleep on the floor until the creatures were gone from the house. That they could no longer take food out of the kitchen (should have been a house rule, oh, about 5 years ago) lest they unwittingly become snacks. And that the Mouse Man was coming on Monday, and he would (surely...oh, please, dear God) make everything better. Even more than the cashier who carded me, I was tempted to hug him just for showing up.
For my five and three year old boys, the whole business of rodents in the house was electrifying. In a good way. The Mouse Man? At our house?
They had to tell the other kids in carpool.
As the news leaked out on the way home from school, I stole shamed glances in the rearview trying to gauge children's reactions. I could just imagining their mothers, shuddering with repulsion, forbidding little Johnnie and Stevie and Katy from ever, EVER setting foot in our house again.
The rodent disclosure was embraced with enthusiasm.
"We had mice in our attic once!," Johnnie said.
I'm embarrassed at how relieved I was.
"Yeah, and did you know that a mouse trap has a really strong pincher on it?" This from little Katy, no relation to Johnnie.
"And you put food in the trap and when the mouse goes to eat it, the pincher pinches the mouse's head." She was quite knowledgeable about the mechanics of a mouse trap. I began to feel a little giddy.
"And then the mouse goes to jail."
"No, it doesn't!," countered Johnnie. "It goes to heaven."
"Nuh, uh!," Katy insisted. "It goes to mouse jail."
Well, then. I guess that takes all the fun out of it for my kids.
By the time we arrived home, Max and Boo were still bursting with excitement over the Mouse Man. You'd have thought we'd gotten a new pet.
"Let's make a mouse trap!," Max shouted.
The kids have seen a mouse trap left over from my home-extermination job after the garage apartment was completed. I contemplated putting a few of them in the attic before bringing in the professionals, but the prospect of a very pissed off rat or opposum up there convinced me otherwise.
The boys vanished into the playroom.
A few minutes later, they were ready to show off their inventions: "Come see, mom!"
Max had positioned three pieces of wood upright and side-by-side, like toy soldiers.
"If one mouse walks in front of this piece of wood, and another mouse bumps into this piece over here, then the wood will fall and SMASH the mouse!" Max was clearly pleased with himself.
"Good thinking, Max." I examined the mechanism for awhile. "But what if there's only one mouse?"
"WELL, when the mouse squeezes through here, I'll push this piece of wood and it will be booby-trapped and it will knock over this piece and SMASH the mouse! It's kind of like dominoes."
"Wow! So will you have to be there in order to get the mouse?"
"I'll hide behind here." He demonstrated his mouse-hunting technique.
"Hmmm, mice are nocturnal...."
"But I'm not going to stay up all night...."
Relieved, once again.
Meanwhile, Boo had been sitting at the table, patiently cutting a rectangular piece of paper.
"Here's my mousetrap!" He held up the paper, creased in the middle, and worked it open and shut with his thumb and fingers. "It's called the Clam."
"Mine's called the Smasher Domino!"
"The Clam is really going to work."
"I think the Smasher Domino is better."
"Do you think the Mouse Man will need our traps?"
Maybe so, sweetheart. Maybe so.
Last week's cold snap had all of the neighborhood rodents looking for a fireplace, a down comforter and a hot toddy. And evidently they're like homing pigeons--once they've got the map to your place, they just keep coming baaaaack.
In the morning I called the nice pest control people. They were due out this afternoon.
Yesterday morning, as I was getting ready to make breakfast, I noticed that our guests hadn't been content with the upstairs accomodations. Or maybe they just got the munchies in the middle of the night.
Because they'd made their way into our kitchen, where they'd left (ahem) evidence of their visit. On our stove. I'm teetering on the brink of Too Much Information here, but I'll just add one other salient point: the evidence suggested that we weren't dealing with your run-of-the-mill field mouse here. Nooooooooo. That would be too simple. Too tolerable. Too pleasant.
What we've got on our hands...no, thankfully, not our hands...what we've got in our midst is one...no, way more than one...several....I'm having a really hard time expressing this without resorting to expletives that I abandoned more than a decade ago...VERY BIG , NASTY, DISGUSTING NOCTURNAL ANIMALS THAT LIKE TO CARRY THE BUBONIC PLAGUE. Living in our house. With us.
After I finished screaming, I spent the next four hours disassembling the Viking range right down to the tubing and scrubbing every square inch of it with soap and bleach and a wire brush.
And I still may never cook on it again.
Anyhoo, I explained to the kids that we had unwanted visitors. Mice, maybe, or rats. That they could not, under any circumstances, sleep on the floor until the creatures were gone from the house. That they could no longer take food out of the kitchen (should have been a house rule, oh, about 5 years ago) lest they unwittingly become snacks. And that the Mouse Man was coming on Monday, and he would (surely...oh, please, dear God) make everything better. Even more than the cashier who carded me, I was tempted to hug him just for showing up.
For my five and three year old boys, the whole business of rodents in the house was electrifying. In a good way. The Mouse Man? At our house?
They had to tell the other kids in carpool.
As the news leaked out on the way home from school, I stole shamed glances in the rearview trying to gauge children's reactions. I could just imagining their mothers, shuddering with repulsion, forbidding little Johnnie and Stevie and Katy from ever, EVER setting foot in our house again.
The rodent disclosure was embraced with enthusiasm.
"We had mice in our attic once!," Johnnie said.
I'm embarrassed at how relieved I was.
"Yeah, and did you know that a mouse trap has a really strong pincher on it?" This from little Katy, no relation to Johnnie.
"And you put food in the trap and when the mouse goes to eat it, the pincher pinches the mouse's head." She was quite knowledgeable about the mechanics of a mouse trap. I began to feel a little giddy.
"And then the mouse goes to jail."
"No, it doesn't!," countered Johnnie. "It goes to heaven."
"Nuh, uh!," Katy insisted. "It goes to mouse jail."
Well, then. I guess that takes all the fun out of it for my kids.
By the time we arrived home, Max and Boo were still bursting with excitement over the Mouse Man. You'd have thought we'd gotten a new pet.
"Let's make a mouse trap!," Max shouted.
The kids have seen a mouse trap left over from my home-extermination job after the garage apartment was completed. I contemplated putting a few of them in the attic before bringing in the professionals, but the prospect of a very pissed off rat or opposum up there convinced me otherwise.
The boys vanished into the playroom.
A few minutes later, they were ready to show off their inventions: "Come see, mom!"
Max had positioned three pieces of wood upright and side-by-side, like toy soldiers.
"If one mouse walks in front of this piece of wood, and another mouse bumps into this piece over here, then the wood will fall and SMASH the mouse!" Max was clearly pleased with himself.
"Good thinking, Max." I examined the mechanism for awhile. "But what if there's only one mouse?"
"WELL, when the mouse squeezes through here, I'll push this piece of wood and it will be booby-trapped and it will knock over this piece and SMASH the mouse! It's kind of like dominoes."
"Wow! So will you have to be there in order to get the mouse?"
"I'll hide behind here." He demonstrated his mouse-hunting technique.
"Hmmm, mice are nocturnal...."
"But I'm not going to stay up all night...."
Relieved, once again.
Meanwhile, Boo had been sitting at the table, patiently cutting a rectangular piece of paper.
"Here's my mousetrap!" He held up the paper, creased in the middle, and worked it open and shut with his thumb and fingers. "It's called the Clam."
"Mine's called the Smasher Domino!"
"The Clam is really going to work."
"I think the Smasher Domino is better."
"Do you think the Mouse Man will need our traps?"
Maybe so, sweetheart. Maybe so.
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