Just as I was settling down for a nice post-xmas, nerdy relaxation of watching back-to-back 24 episodes, red wine, and tax preparations, a little brown mouse darted past me from beneath our stove to under our hot pink living room couch. Eeek!! My friend Jenn actually befriend her mouse visitor, but for me, dude, it positively shatters the feeling that my apartment is a sanctuary.
What do you do? My husband asked that I look for humane traps, like a mouse motel, and while I don’t really want to pay extra for a mouse to enjoy duvet covers, I also don’t want to deal with dead little creatures. I searched for traps at my local Rite Aid. There’s a whole section for mouse solutions–mouse traps that have in Sspanish Mata ratones all over the packaging, there are gigantic blocks of mysterious green material that mice apparently nibble on and then just die. My husband, Buddhist that he is, cannot abide by ending a mouse life. Me? I can’t either, for entirely different reasons. Not for any motivation as lovely and profound as the transmigration of souls, but simply because I am squeamish. I can’t really bear to even kill bugs for this reason, so I’m cool with David politely escorting cockroaches out of our apartment without smooching them into squashed afterthoughts. (Eeeew. Even imagining this gives me the heebie jeebies. Do you see why I’m okay with a lack of nature in my life?) I shouldn’t have told my mouse tale to my parents, who react to my once-in-a-while coughs as a sign of like threatening illness, but things have been slow and they need something to fret about.
Please little mouse, just go hang out somewhere else.