Upon Discovering a Mouse in the House…

Turns out we have a mouse in our house. Yes, a mouse. Just like in the Dr. Suess book. Who knows, maybe even mice.

I had noticed soon after we moved in and I’d put everything in place in the kitchen that under the sink were some little black seed-looking things. At first, I thought it was dirt dropping off of the brush-and-dust pan I kept under there.

I cleaned it up, but a week or so later, noticed some more. This time, I made sure that I removed all of them, to see if they’d come back again.

By now I was thinking they were eggs from some kind of bug or something. Within a week or so again, there were more. So I went online and started doing some searching, typing in, "found small black seed dots in kitchen" and similarly ambiguous descriptions like that.

Lo and behold, someone had posed the same kind of question on some forum and dozens of responses chimed in, "Mouse droppings!"

My jaw dropped and I was immediately gripped by the heebie jeebies. What I thought were seeds were actually…droppings?! From a mouse?! Ew.

It’s not that I’ve never seen a mouse before. Once when I still lived at home, my sister and I were baking cookies of some sort—fortune cookies, maybe—in the kitchen and we saw a mouse scamper across the counter. We screamed bloody murder, somehow managed to trap it and then I think let my mom deal with it when she got home.

Even at our old apartment we had a squirrel—yes, a small, acorn-eating, fluffy-tailed squirrel—sneak into our apartment which we chased down—oven mitts and all—to shoo out the front door. (Read more about that adventure here.)

But those were both one-time things. No, this time, it’s obvious that the critter has been here so often that it knows its way around the place, leaving a trail, as it were.

My online-search suspicions were confirmed the following night when I was sitting on the couch in our living room and all of a sudden a small brown (admittedly, kind of cute) mouse darted from the fireplace across the living room and disappeared in the kitchen. By the time I got in there, it was gone. It knew where it was going.

Now, I know we live in the woods. I know our house is older so there are likely to be quite a few side doors for the little critters to enter in. It’s not that we’re dirty or cluttery or leave cheese sitting out on the counter.

But part of me is embarrassed to admit that there is a little mouse who considers this his house as much as we do. Part of me feels like if we were doing this home-ownership thing right, the mice would turn around and march right out, tipping their hats and waving goodbye as they go.

Of course that’s absurd.

But isn’t that how we think, sometimes? That if I was better or more prepared or more whatever, then I wouldn’t have to deal with this problem. Sure, sometimes that’s the case. But sometimes—it’s not. Sometimes there’s a problem and you simply have to deal with it.

Did we hollow out those holes into our house? No. Did we empty out a mouse-sized crevice and invite him in? No. Those things already existed and now, we simply have to deal with them. Sometimes, that’s just the way it is.

(But truth be told, it’s enough to make me want to get a cat.)

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