I’ve had two encounters with mice this week, and I only rose to the level of Robert Burns once.
The first was with the mouse we have in the garage. We’ve had a mouse in the garage a couple of times since we’ve lived at Nogglestead. One made its way into the interior of the cabinets beneath the bar downstairs, which were attached to the wall below the garage and had cut-outs for plumbing and whatnot; the mouse got in and helped itself–the audacity!–to the cat food we had stored there (the cat food is even now stored in a different cabinet so readily available to mice from outside). Another, or the same one, got into my nuts-and-bolts drawer, ate some plastic bags, and excreted all over everything.
This new mouse was a little more polite. I saw it scurrying toward the interior wall sometimes at night when I flipped on the light to toss something in the recycling or get into the truck for something. My beautiful wife had received a hanging bird feeder as a gift along with some sunflower seeds to stock it a couple years ago. As the environs around Nogglestead are pretty windy, a hanging bird feeder would probably not attract many birds unless they were thrill seekers, the apparatus remained in the garage. The new mousey, though, had gotten into the granary and spilled sunflower seeds all over the floor. Last Saturday, I got it into my head to clean the garage, which also meant mousey had to go. So I laid out a couple of glue traps in the newly-cleaner section of the garage to which I’d seen the mouse scurrying.
On Sunday morning, as we were getting into the truck for church, I saw that mousey was on one of the glue strips. So I sent my tender-hearted wife into the house on some pretext so I could deal with the mouse. It was on its side, stuck fast, but frightened and whimpering in a mousely fashion.
I grabbed the glue trap by the edge and put it into a plastic bag, stepped on the bag to end it quickly for the mouse, and tossed it into the garbage. I mean, as a man, it is my role to handle this sort of thing, but I still felt bad for the beastie throughout church and worried that I might have only crushed its pelvis or something, leaving it in agony and starving to death in the garbage. I am not sure if it makes me a sociopath to dwell on these things; probably not, since I feel bad about it (or at least claim to on the Internet, gentle reader–LIKE A REAL SOCIOPATH WOULD).
The second mouse I saw only briefly when I was mowing the lawn. It’s been a cool, wet spring here in the Ozarks. Of course, we’ve had our share of wet springs; we’re learning that, if it’s not raining on a weekend, that’s the time to work in the garden, for next week it will rain and be too wet to plant. The wet weather pattern means that the grass is growing, and we haven’t had time to mow it. So I went out to tame the 10″ to 14″ demipastures with the old John Deere. Of course, the long grass provides cover for all sorts of fauna. This afternoon, it was a bounding shape ahead of the mower that proved to be a little field mouse (and not a frog, as I sometimes see, or the occasional turtle, although turtles do not tend to bound). I slowed the mower and let the little guy go; I know they have a role to play in the ecosystem.
But not in my garage.
So perhaps I was not channeling Robert Burns either time since I didn’t want to write a poem about the experience.
Just a twee blog post.
