Things around the old homestead have been deteriorating lately. The washer stopped draining, the fridge developed a death rattle. (This I blame on obsolescence: the latter having cooled things for the past 20 years. This also means this ship we’ve spent the last 5 years living in is still much older than our residence herein. Go Stonebridge! You age gracefully.)

We’ve been living with mice for damn near a month. I confess other life things like editing 500+ page budgets and seeing rock n rollers of my youth have taken precedence over being a good house frau. My dog is a badger hunter, not a mouse killer, and I am allergic to cats. I should have rented the neighbor’s meow, though, as I learned this morning.

Saturday was devoted to shopping appliances, I dressed up, J. dressed down, and we braved the mall (gasp!) for the second time, this time armed with measurements for where the machines of the modern life will live. Then we took the hound to the park and observed large spiders hanging in the treetops and a grey gray heron chilling in the wepawaug. Coastal birds, you always look beautiful.

That night the extent of the mouse situation became clear to me when I once again celebrated what I’ve begun to dub insomnia saturdays…since this is week 2 of some kind of sleep schedule wackness. Listless, I baked some biscotti for this week’s hunger action bake-off. The level of mouse partyjams was pretty serious. When I went into the pantry to retrieve sugar, I heard the telltale scratching. When I moved the coffee machine, it became clear that the party was not limited to the pantry. They’d moved the poop ship all over town. It was disgusting.

We take a very Buddhist approach to housework around here—kind of like that haiku I love by Kobayashi Issa:

Don’t worry, spiders

I keep house

casually.

But turning my countertops into a toilet and partying like its 1999 will not stand! I borrowed the van on Sunday and 1) did some basement excavation of high school love letters and 1990s photographs 2) checked out an encaustic workshop @ CWOS and 3) moved a couch and picked up Lola B. 4) ate a cookie 5) hit up the grocery store food bazaar where I picked up some cheeses for me and some traps for the mice. But after what I just saw, I kind of wish I’d shared the apple cider-aged german cheese I bought with them.

Is is a rite of adulthood to purchase mousetraps? I stalled on purchasing them because I don’t like to kill things. In Boston, we lived with rodents for three years in a kind of self-deceiving denial about it. It was only when I saw a long-nailed and tailed rat crawl up the back wall of our closet that I put all the pieces together. (Grey hair on the edge of the carpet, but no cats? Sounds of creatures crawling in the walls? Cookies mysteriously disappearing from countertops? No, that didn’t clue me in. I would make a terrible detective.)  I also didn’t know what kind of traps to buy, so I purchased BOTH traditional snap-traps and glue traps. The latter, I’ve decided, should be outlawed.

Some hours back, I set them and went to sleep. In bed I heard a scream and knew I was a killer. I keep telling myself that it is ok to kill something that could give me hanta virus, but I also feel like maybe my poor night’s sleep owes some debt to the violence I have wrought in this dark closet where I keep my oatmeal. I woke up at 3 AM and after about an hour I decided to just start the day, since I wasn’t sleeping anyway. I made cornbread and prayed silently that all the ingredients I needed would be available outside the pantry of certain extermination. However, I opened the door in search of parchment and a tiny rodent writhed at the light pouring in. Horrible is not the right word for how I feel. I know I can’t move these dead and half-dead corpses, and yet someone is going to have to.

I don’t like violence, and meaningless violence certainly earns my biggest disdain, but in this case I’m feeling like a failure as a human. A person like me should have called on the neighbor’s cat to humanely kill these wee vermin. This glue is sicker than anything. Traps, traps, traps I don’t like, but at least they are fast and painless. That there is still a half-dead creature writhing in my pantry is sick. I don’t know how I’m going to make supper without thinking about the furry little wee mice who just wanted to eat all of my organic coconut and chew through my sugar cones, and poop all over the place. I guess I just have to remember their poop—no one wants to live in a poop ship.