confessions: the great mouse hunt

Considering that I grew up watching Fievel Goes West, the Great Mouse Detective and Tom & Jerry, you might be surprised at how desperately I wanted one simple creature vanquished from this earth.

First, there were the occasional mouse droppings in the laundry room. Not okay. Then, whole bags of sugar, popcorn and even macaroni were torn apart.

This meant war.

I started my counter-offensive by clearing out all the perishable food and stowing things in plastic containers. Cardboard meant nothing to this super-powered mouse. He still found a way into boxes of food and then encroached on my kitchen. I found mouse droppings inside my oven. The oven!

Doesn’t this look appealing?

{Let me add: at this point, three whole rooms of my house received full scrubbing and organizing… which the house needed. At least the mouse was good for something.}

I purchased traps and we put globs of peanut butter on them and placed them throughout the laundry room and pantry. I hoped he’d have a quick, painless end. Twelve dollars in traps, and a teaspoon of peanut butter later, he’d snapped one trap, cleared the peanut butter off another and left the other two untouched.

After two weeks of the traps failing and finding more evidence of the mouse — I swear he was just taunting me at this point — I turned to poison. I don’t like poisons — I have two dogs and am not fond of vet bills. But this mouse’s tyrannical rule had to end.

I set the poison out and a day later… I find blue-poison colored droppings im the mouse’s usual hangouts. That thing wouldn’t die!

Alas, the voracious mouse consumed a whole block of poison and half of a second one, and I’ve finally stopped seeing evidence of him.

His base of operations.

Yesterday, my husband texts me, “I found your mouse’s home…” and when I got home, he told me I’d never guess where it was. And after twenty minutes of listing every nook and cranny in the house, I still hadn’t guessed right.

Then, he showed me.

That rotten mouse had burrowed into a filing cabinet. A filing cabinet! This particular drawer housed my clips from college and all my hand-written stories and novels I’d written in high school. Apparently, the mouse wasn’t fond of my writing.

Thanks, Mouse. You had a good run. I hope you cause havoc in mouse heaven.

Sincerely,

the mouse-slayer