September 30, 2020

We live in an old house. In fact, it’s more than a century old. When we first moved in here, into this house on a corner lot, there was an elderly woman living kitty-corner from us who told us that when she was a girl, this house of ours had actually been a duplex. She knew this because she and her family lived on one side of it. He chuckled and told me that was how far she’d come in life—all the way across the street.

We’ve made some repairs and improvements to this house over the years, but an old house is an old house, and often features something that those who did not grow up in a rural environment might find creepy to think about—mice.

Our house in the country, when I was a kid growing up, always had an influx of mice in the fall—field mice coming inside for the winter. My mother would set traps, of course, but she also had one wise saying: mice are a pain, but as long as you have mice, you know you don’t have rats. Apparently those two rodents do not live together.

Now y’all are saying, “OMG rats?” Let me tell you. There were two times in my memory when rats were a real problem. Both occurred when we lived on that old road of ours out in the country. About a mile to the north of us was a chicken farm operation. The story, as I heard it from my mother was that one day they decided to fumigate their barn between shipments of chicks – and did something very wrong, because there ensued a stampede of a herd of rats down the road. It wasn’t a very busy road, so not many of them were killed by traffic. All the neighbors had rat problems for a good month.

I awoke with one on my bed, and I wasn’t much more than nine or ten at the time.

That said, I’m still not a fan of having any rodents here in the house. At all. Over the years we’ve tried standard traps and those small plastic box so-called humane traps. We’d catch a few each fall. But not all of them.

Over the last few months or so, I have endured two major irritants in my life: my family’s habit of leaving the doors open for extended periods of time, and the darn rodents. And then I discovered that those two irritants had merged.

I had the suspicion that we had a critter in the kitchen, one larger than a mouse. I caught sight, a couple of times, of something zooming fast in my peripheral vision. Something…furry. Just a wisp in the corner of my eye, but I knew what it was. I knew.

And then one day, I heard a sound…I swiveled my chair and looked, and I saw it! From my chair in my office, I saw it! I told the others, but they did not believe me.

What is it about one’s having grey hair that makes people discount anything you have to say? I swear, one of these days, I’m going to demonstrate why I refer to my cane as a whoopin’ stick.

But I digress.

Indignant that I was not believed, I formed a plan. It took some time but finally, I heard that sound again. I reached for my cell phone and ever so silently swiveled my chair around. I took a picture, one that proved that I had indeed seen…a chipmunk. Living under my kitchen cupboards but coming out during the day to see what he or she could scavenge.

We tried leaving the back door open during the morning—the Chippie’s active time of day—and it completely ignored the hint to be gone. None of us can move fast enough to capture the little varmint, and those dogs? Why would they hunt a rodent? They have kibble in their dish.

Finally, I went looking online, and found a small live trap that listed that it could accommodate chipmunks, mice, rats and even muskrats—so glad I don’t live near a marsh.

The trap finally arrived last week, and we set it up. Though we also knew we had mice we didn’t expect to catch any, but we did. A few small mice have been relocated to the far back yard atop the hill—as has our former, resident Chipmunk.

Poor Chippie was not a happy camper when the door to that cage slammed shut.

But I sure was.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury