About a year ago, as the trees were changing and I was cozying up into my favorite season of the year, we had our first, and hopefully last experience with mice. Now, this wasn’t the first time I had come in close contact with Mickey Mouse’s furrier and decidedly less-talkative cousins. From what I can remember, I’m pretty sure a mouse or two wound up in my family’s home while I was growing up, but this was back when animals were harmless and cute and not harbingers of death and disease (and before this).
And up until this point last year, I still believed that I was tough—I could handle pain, unpleasant injuries, taking care of a Benadryl-drunk husband two months into our marriage when he was covered in hives and telling me he was going to die, and I even fancied myself to be the type of person who could kill and skin (de-feather?) a chicken should my family ever be destitute on a prairie with dwindling supplies of sustenance. But, because of this experience, I now know that really, I am just a gigantic chicken loser myself.
It began one evening, when my husband looked over at me as we were driving to the grocery store with a somber expression on his face. "I have something to tell you" he started, and immediately my mind went in twelve different directions, anticipating the entire spectrum of serious things he could possibly be announcing with such a statement, anything from "I want to buy a goldfish" to "I don't love you anymore and I'm going to have a child with a waitress named Crystal." But, even with my mind's preparation, I still did not manage to fathom the horror of what was coming next.
*blank stare* "What is it?"
*freaking out*
"But earlier today at home I saw something out of the corner of my eye and when I looked over, there was a mouse in the kitchen."
*blank stare as the news sunk in, then*
"YOU LET ME HANG AROUND WITH A MOUSE ALL AFTERNOON UNKNOWINGLY DO YOU EVEN CARE ABOUT ME I COULD HAVE BEEN SITTING IN FECES ALL DAY AND I HAD NO IDEA HOW COULD YOU"
But afterwards I was like, yeah, he made a good choice in not telling me.
At the grocery store, we stood pensively in front of the death section, contemplating what type of end our mouse should meet. After much deliberation—regarding the most humane way to go about it but really caring more about what was cheaper—we decided on the traditional traps ($1.99) that, supposedly, do the job instantly instead of the terrifying sticky pad things ($5.99) that make the mouse sit and suffer and think about all the injustice and pain it's suffered in its life until it dies.
We believed they were crawling up into the kitchen through this grate beneath the stove (which is probably one of the grossest sentences ever and I apologize), so we decided to put the trap in the inch and a half space between the stove and the counter top. After my husband spread peanut butter on a trap, I watched as he tried approximately fifteen times to set it without subsequently springing the trap. (I did not laugh.) But, eventually, he got it and we went to bed hoping that there weren't also mice in the mattress. Or in our pillow cases. Or watching us from the crack in the ceiling.
I also thought about the prospect of me transferring raw meat from the counter to a hot frying pan in the future, and worrying about whether my unknowingly dropping a tiny piece of meat down into that little space one day would result in the mice developing a taste for flesh. Anyways.
The first one up in the morning for work, I found myself running quickly past the kitchen as I left the house and not wanting to look at the trap. I had a feeling our peanut butter death trap (also another name for Reese's Puffs) had been successful, and I was not ready to see the carnage we had enacted, or the furry thing that was sharing our house with us. But, fortunately, I still got to see it because I got a text a half hour later including a picture of a tiny dead mouse clamped on the neck on our kitchen floor. I guess my husband thought I wouldn't believe a simple "Hey, we caught one!" or "That trap worked!" or "I realize you aren't really into looking at dead things and I respect that so I won't show you a picture of the aftermath but you should know that we caught the mouse. Also, I love you and you are the best" text.
That night, we set another one just in case, and in the morning I ran in a similar fashion past the kitchen and at work I received a similar picture and reacted with similar disgust. But TWO. We had caught TWO. WAS OUR HOUSE NOT CLEAN? DID I LEAVE A BLOCK OF CHEESE UNDER THE OVEN? WERE WE HOUSING AN UNDERGROUND REFUGE FOR UNDERPRIVILEGED ORPHAN MICE?!
After disposing of the second mouse, my husband set a third trap before he left for school and I came home that evening really, really not wanting to be there. I put on the thickest socks I owned, ate from my stash of snacks I left up high in the living room so I wouldn't have to go in the kitchen, and sat in fetal position on the couch while doing my homework. After an hour or so of this, and probably reading the same page forty times, a piercing SNAP echoed into the room from the kitchen.
And immediately I looked like this.
Let me just say, you have not known fear until you've had a mouse in your house. And you definitely have not known fear until you've been sitting on your couch, just doing homework with Food Network on in the background (the most unthreatening and cozy channel, I might add), when a gigantic SNAP comes from the kitchen, and you know that there is either a smart mouse running around having bested your trap, or a wriggling, dying mouse attached to it.
I texted my mom and my husband at the same time, saying:
THERE WAS JUST A HUGE SNAP THAT CAME FROM THE KITCHEN AND I THINK IT WAS THE TRAP AND I AM SCARED
To which both of them replied, Go look at it!!
And what followed both of them saying that were back and forth conversations that looked like this:
DO IT
I DONT WANT TO
COME ON JUST DO IT
I CANT. WHAT IF IT'S STILL ALIVE?!
JUST GO LOOK
NO
IT CAN'T HURT YOU
HOW CAN YOU BE SURE
ARE YOU SERIOUS?!
I DONT FEEL SAFE IN MY OWN HOUSE I HATE EVERYTHING
Needless to say, they were not proud of me that day. And I wasn't proud of myself. But luckily, for all of us, that was the last mouse that dared to venture into our house—that we know of—because we left a trap in that spot for the rest of the time we lived there and it was never touched again. So I suppose the moral of this story, if there is one, is that you don't know yourself until you've properly experienced a mice invasion in your home. And when it happens, you may not like what you find.
I found out that I'm a loser in more ways than I thought. But...at least I'm well rounded.
And that, my friends, is what me being positive looks like. And the left panel of this drawing is what me thinking looks like.
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