We had a mouse in the house.
Had being the key word here. We would hear it scurrying in the attic, usually in the wee hours of the morning. “Did you hear that?” We wanted to believe it was something else. The wind. A cat on the roof. We were in denial.
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We really didn’t want to believe that we, a relatively tidy couple, could have a rodent problem. But we knew something was tampering with our lemon tree. Skillfully taking the peel off and leaving the lemons behind. I imagined it was making a lemon peel nest in our attic. Snuggling into the zesty rind.
But as much as I wanted to believe the mouse wasn’t doing any harm, in the back of my mind I feared it was eating away at my childhood keepsakes that were stored up there.
We had to do something!
We mustered the guts to set some mouse traps.
The springs were loaded and a fresh square of American cheese was our bait.
I hated the idea of having to resort to such an archaic contraption to rid us of our pest. But we didn’t know of any other options. So we placed the traps carefully in the attic, and hoped the mouse would go away on its own. Pack up and move on.
Or maybe it would outsmart the trap.
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We waited. . . and waited. . .
Until last Sunday afternoon when we heard a flailing about of sorts.
Something trapped. . . but not dead.
We didn’t plan for that. I mean, we didn’t plan on having to uhhh, finish the job. In fact, I planned on never seeing it at all. I would let Travis handle it and I would be washed of the whole sin-ish act.
But now, well now we had a live furry animal in our attic dying a slow, painful death!
I mean picture this cute little thing in pain.
We had to do something!
My friend Jessica was visiting for the weekend. And between my screams and high-pitched exclamations, I somehow managed to recruit her as a bucket holder. Now, with a three-man team, we planned to catch it and assess the situation once we saw the damage.
Travis tilted the attic door open [insert my screaming, and oh god! here] and the mouse, sans trap, slid down into the bucket that Jessica held up so bravely. My job was to put the lid on the bucket. But as Jessica shoved the bucket towards me, I screamed and motioned for her to put it down. She, on the other hand, was waiting for me to put the lid on before she put it down. Clearly the logistics were not worked out well enough before the execution. There was lots of screaming and laughing. Not the I’m laughing at an animal's sad situation laugh, but a nervous laugh that just instinctually comes out when there is something icky to be deal with (i.e. large bugs, etc.).
We took the bucket outside and Travis assessed the damages.
The poor mouse’s hand was trapped.
I couldn’t look. I felt too bad. So we debated. And debated.
And it looked to us that if the trap was released, the mouse would live.
Maybe with a hurt hand.
But it would be okay. So we did something ironic.
Travis put gloves on, reached into the bucket, and prepared to release the mouse from the trap. But the frightened mouse flailed when it saw Travis' hand coming close. It scared it so much so that it was able to muster together all its might and pull its hand out of the trap.
Still in the bucket. Travis took him to the street, and let him go.
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He ran along the gutter. And we cheered. And cheered.
He runs fine!
We watched as he ran up our neighbor’s driveway and into their planter bed. Oops. Sorry Steve.
Again, the logistics were not worked out very well.
Again, the logistics were not worked out very well.
Even though we were the ones who set the traps, blindly thinking that the result wouldn’t shake us, it did. And we felt compelled to help our little unsolicited guest. We realized that killing it was not what we wanted. We just wanted it gone. Out of our attic. Out of our things.
The truth is, when that little furry mouse was caught, we were caught. And when it was released, there was a little part of us that went with it. Our hope that it would live on, and find another zesty nest to call home.
