How to Catch a Mouse
Step 1: Notice.
Notice a kleenex – dragged from the box and ripped to tiny shreds. Assume your husband’s being weirdly untidy. Clean it up. The next day, notice a new one. Repeat.
Step 2: Panic.
In a sudden dawn of realization, panic: you have mice! What are you going to do? You imagine your house overrun with mouse droppings, your kitchen every morning covered in tiny, floury, contagious tracks, your banisters transformed to rodent slides, your bed the comfy crawling travel terminal for arriving mouse cousins, your pillow a soft resting spot for little hanta-carrying gymnasts who sleep by day and frolic all night. You breathe into a paper bag to calm yourself but wonder, does the bag smell a bit of mouse pee? Does everything? Can you smell anything but the faint, imagined scent of mouse? The mice are in your nose now that they’ve gotten into your brain.
Step 3: Decide.
You stand at a fulcrum: you can jump with both feet into making this better, or you can ride the decay down. If you don’t actively make it better, it will get worse. No doubt, mice love company – there will be more of them. And exploration – you’ve seen that picture of Ralph the Mouse on a motorcycle. You know what they’re capable of. Right now, from this moment forward, this has to get better or it will get worse. You choose “better.” You want to live! You want to smell clean air without paranoia. You will take a stand here, now. But how?
Step 4: Pick a persona; produce a plan.
The first obvious plan is to ask your husband to get rid of the mice by any means necessary. Tempting, but he’s already deeply stressed about a last minute work project. And really, you know you’ll just add aggravation and impatience on top of your own current stress if you wait for someone to save you. That’s always how it is. Idly (or even aggressively) playing the damsel in distress role makes you fidgety and irritable. It’s not the kind of action plan you’re looking for.
The second obvious plan is to hire a guy. You know, the guy – with the greyish, polyester, short-sleeved pseudo-uniform covered in official(ish) embroidered patches, and with a hard hat worn at all times to show rodents he means business. You’re not sure what he’ll do exactly, and at this point you really don’t care if he shortens your lifespan by five years with toxic chemicals to eliminate the mice. You want the mice OUT. But problem: we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and having this guy into your house could shatter your loved ones’ health if he’s contagious. It’s not worth it. Damn those mice and their timing. At this point, you’re willing to be creative, but as you scan the options horizon, the only remaining plan you can see is for you to tuff up and handle this yourself. You against them. You, armed mouse warrior – competent, capable, determined. You, brave mouse warrior.
Step 5: Train.
You realize that one doesn’t go to battle without training first. Knights, ninjas, all of them first spend time whacking each other with sticks, learning bits of wisdom, honing their blades, staring wistfully at a campfire, etc. You’ve seen the movies. You crown your head with a tightened bandana and turn now to Youtube. Let the training Begin.
You search for “rodent repellent that works” and “catching mice” and “when mice sleep” and “what mice eat” and “do mice chew fabric,” and the answers are maybe and good luck and daytime and peanut butter and maybe, and that leads you inevitably to an online rotating aerial boatlift in Scotland and a very rude, barking Cockatoo and an incredibly endearing gaggle of ducklings with wills of iron. (You also learn that, actually, while a group of geese is a gaggle, a group of ducks is a raft. Go figure.) But the situation is dire, you know, so you tighten your bandana and refocus. Let the ducklings inspire you forward. You will not be distracted.
Step 6: Arm yourself.
Gird up. You’ll need tools, weapons. You search for weapons first – snap traps, gluey things, plastic tombs to throw straight into the trash – and you just can’t do it. The imagined scenes of the battlefield are too much; the possible suffering too cruel and unfair. As much as you fear and despise them, and as much as they stink both literally and figuratively, you can’t be their monster. They’re just living their lives and, honestly, if you were a mouse, you’d like your house quite well too. Good food, nice decor, comfy digs. Really, they’re just cursed with good taste, and you can’t punish that. Plus, there are not enough pairs of gloves in the world for you to pick up a detonated snap trap. You are, you realize, a warrior pacifist.
Time to turn to the peacenik solutions. In the Storehouse of Everything (aka Amazon), an infinite array of solutions unfold before you, unfortunately most of them with three and half stars signifying more consumer optimism than success. Sprays that drive out men but not mice; bars of stink bomb soap that customers’ rats chewed on with relish and gusto; electronic deterrents that rodents delightedly built nests upon. Your hope flags but is not extinguished. This mouse issue must get better, or else it will get worse. Others must have triumphed. There must be something that works.
Over the course of a nighttime, you become entranced by a man who tests mouse deterrents online and you find a few promising candidates. At least they give you some hope. Bless this persistent man and his barn full of rodents. You share your middle-of-the-night joy by forwarding some of his revelatory, hidden-camera videos of mice playing rugby with Irish Spring soap to your friends, with messages of “Incredible!” and “It gets really informative at minute seven.” You are a fangirl, and you know what you need to do. You press “Buy,” and, within an hour, a slew of nonfatal weaponry is headed your way. You live in the country, with the nearest stores an hour’s drive away, but you’d gladly jump in your car right now to seduce a home improvement store with money. But, again, pandemic. You’ve committed to staying out of stores except for groceries. You think maybe, maybe this is worth the risk, but more searching says that the big box stores don’t actually have much of anything in stock. You’ll have to wait. You squinch up your eyes in a wish for fast shipping, and drift to peaceful sleep.
Step 7: Waiting is hard.
You bide time making yourself feel productive by researching more. You learn the “peanut oil trick” and get all fired up to do it, until you realize that all it takes is one mouse smarter than you for you to have greased upholstery forever. You bide time as well by making resolutions. You will forever in the future be stocked with mouse battle gear; you will do your best not to be caught off guard like this again. You will anticipate other mishaps in advance and gear up for those too. You will look directly at danger and plan for it; you will not look away with hope next time. You will be ready to halt (or at least halve) trouble before it hits.
Step 8: Practice for action.
When the grasshopper (that’s you) is ready, then, well… it’s time to hop. The reality is that, although waiting is tough, starting can feel even harder. First, unbox everything. Sniff curiously at the stinky deterrent stuff like you’re a two year-old with magic markers; poke the ultrasonic disco box you bought for the mice and wonder if you’re a complete gullible; walk your fingers into the humane trap to see how it springs closed. It’s smaller than you expected. At this point, the mice are ten feet tall in your head.
After all the curious prodding, practice. You can imagine a mouse walking into a trap, but how do you get him (or her) out? Visions of you and the mouse jumping up and down, screaming in panic together on opposite sides of green plastic, race through your head. You need to be a pro at opening this thing before it ever catches the wandering eye of a snackish rodent. Sit on the sofa and practice the squeeze-and-push of the release door, over and over and over, while listening to your husband’s day at work. Do reps, do sets, own this thing. Imagine a little fuzzy, rapid-twitch guy in there: what gloves are you wearing? What do you do (after screaming) if you have trouble getting him out? How often do you need to check the trap to prevent stress heart attacks (theirs, that is)? Where do you release him? Your husband asks why you’re humming Eye of the Tiger, and then joins in.
Step 9: Lay the bait, set the trap.
First up, roll ¾ inch balls of peanut butter. Taste test as necessary. There’s no category in the diet app for “extra peanut butter from the mouse bait stash,” so it must be calorie-free. Enjoy some peanut butter on carrots and some peanut butter on toast, really take some time to relish your forgotten love of peanut butter. Then, refocus: back to business. Load the uneaten pb balls into the traps. Lay out the traps in shadowy, hidden spots. Check your watch. Step away.
Step 10: Say hello to your cute little fears.
Check your traps on schedule. At some point when you peek down into the dim light, you will meet your fears. They are teensy, with little twitchy noses and soft-padded paws. They are afraid, and they are curious. They are so small that they will not even see you; they will know only the immediacy of the walls around them, and the waft of untouchable treats, and the perplexity of being stuck. You will know tenderness and, yes, triumph. Pull on the gloves you’ve readied, put the full traps into the paper grocery bag standing nearby, and grab your keys. It’s time to take your stinky little fears for a ride.
