Of Mice and War

"Your turn to take care of collateral damage," I announced as Bill was relaxing on the couch last night.

"Whaddya mean?" he said.

"You know what I mean," I responded. "It' your turn."

"Oh, are you talking about the mice?" he asked. "That's not collateral damage." Then, he started some explanation about cats and why it wasn't collateral damage.

I broke him off in mid-sentence.

"Well, it's your turn," I repeated.

"Where is it?" he asked.

"In the garage cabinet," I said. "On one of the traditional mousetraps."

Bill lingered for a while, but when I kept peeking around the corner from the kitchen, he knew he might as well get up and go dispose of the corpse.

We've had a mouse invasion of late. Twasn't so bad when, earlier this fall, we discovered their telltale signs, limited to the cabinets in the garage where I've been storing food for three years with no problems. On that discovery, I simply threw away all the bags of chips and pasta with little holes gnawed through the corners.

All other stuff with chewable covering went in the hot water tank closet inside the house from that point on.

Problem solved, or so I thought.

Recently, mouse turds showed up in one of the drawers on the kitchen cabinets opposite any door or opening from the outside. Since those drawers just contained seemingly nonedible stuff like match boxes, I didn't get too concerned. Bill put mousetraps in each drawer.

Saturday night, however, when I discovered two fat mouse turds on my clean, folded dish towels in the cabinet drawer near the sink, the wrath of a mad woman broke loose.

"I will NOT live like this," I announced. "We've gone for 30 years without a mouse in the house, and now I'll be horrified every day."

Bill tried to argue.

"We had that one mouse in the bathtub that time at the other house," he reminded me.

"Yeah, one mouse, and we never did figure out how that one got in," I said. We actually thought it might have been one the cat, Malcolm at the time, brought inside to show off. Cats are like that, ya know.

We had lived with mice in our honeymoon home out of Lakeshore Drive, and, in that situation we're talking a major infestation. Our first home was a trailer house eight miles out, which we rented from Flossie Berg. We stayed there for three months after our June wedding.

The most hideous memory I have of that place was the night the mouse got between the blankets on the bed, and we couldn't figure out how to get it out of there for several minutes. The little lump just kept scurrying from one side of the bed to the other until it finally found an exit route and raced on down the hallway.

There were more hideous memories of that place than the mice, though. That was the summer of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army traveling the country, robbing banks. Rumor had it that they even came through Sandpoint.

That was also the summer after a couple had been murdered (one beheaded, if I remember correctly) down in Rathdrum, and shortly before we moved out there, a local, walking along the Pend Oreille River shore, found one of their wallets just across the road from our trailer.

And, that was the summer Bill worked for the Forest Service at Smith Creek five days a week near the Canadian Border, and Marianne spent nights in that place scared spitless.

To make matters worse, Bill had also mentioned hearing a cougar scream one night before we got married. Between the mice, the potential murderers and kidnappers and the possibility of being eaten up by a cougar, I spent a lot of nervous minutes inhabiting that place.

We got out of there in the fall and moved into my folks' rental on the hill above Great Northern Road. We had mice there, and then we had mice AND lice in the first house we ever owned on down Great Northern Road.

That house had the decency to burn down in 1984 just after the second lice infestation, brought home by kids from school, had us all paranoic and constantly scratching at phantom itches.

Actually, it wasn't decent of that house to burn down in any way, shape or form, but it did solve the lice problem---and probably baked a few mice in the process.

So, those hideous memories came back to haunt me all Saturday night as I tried to sleep. I grabbed a few winks, but my brain was too engrossed in tactical ideas for ridding our house of those creatures as quickly as possible.

That morning I announced to Bill that we were wasting no time to do everything in our power to get rid of them, even if it meant calling in the pest control. I told Bill the only thing that I could imagine to be worse than our situation was another neighbor's recent discovery of huge ant colonies, which had built into the wall of their home.

After two days of paying pest control to find the source and destroy it, our friend had to take out the wall, piece by piece, and put it all back together again. Understandably, he calls it the worst nightmare imaginable, only it's true.

So, Sunday morning we cleaned. We threw away all food that could have even been looked at or touched by a mouse. We washed all pans, dishes, towels in those enclosures. Bill bought even more mousetraps. We called my sisters and asked about the super duper mousetrap they'd purchased a couple of years ago when the critters were trying to take over my mother's house.

Barbara gave me all the details and said the better trap could be found at Wal-Mart. She also told me that the day before a mouse had actually boldly walked under Mother's front door and marched up to mere feet away from the resident cat. He simply looked at it and went on about his business, which didn't include chasing mice.

Later, Sunday morning, Bill and my sisters met---oddly enough---at the mousetrap section of Wal Mart. The super duper variety apparently was sold out, so they bought their supplies of other varieties and visited with even more friends who were stocking up on traps. Bill came home with even more artillery for our arsenal last night.

The only concern I have right now is remembering where all those newly planted mouse mines happen to be so I don't scare the beejeebers out of myself when I accidentally set one off.

Well, we think we're winning in our war. So far, in three days, two casualties and NO NEW TURDS in the cupboards. Thank God. Even though not holding my breath, I am sleeping a little better than I did Saturday night.