Tag Archives: mice

Pat, rats, stones and story time

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As another ride around the sun rolled by, it’s March again. Not just March, but the day that I will always associate with the greats, Caesar and Pat. The Ides of March have come (but not gone), and so my mother’s birthday.

Even if it weren’t her birthday, I woke up thinking of Pat any way, a sign maybe in the universe’s kink of sending signs. Here’s the story.

The other night, I was toddling off to bed. It was later than it should have been, and like my mother before me I had fallen asleep on the couch. The wind and rain howled outside.

I saw a little ball on the floor, which I thought was loose yarn I had dropped from my crochet/knitting bag. I stooped to pick it up.

It wasn’t yarn. It was warm and moved a little. I yelped and took my hand back.

Apparently, a little critter in the order rodentia was living its final hours in a fetal ball. I assisted it down the road to the final roundup, off this mortal coil, and into a plastic bag, triple tied.

The next day, traps were set. Then, at 2:47 a.m. March 15, 2023, the same day Pat was born in the auspicious year of 1929, while banks are failing again, I heard a snap from another room. I buried my head deeper under my blankets and pillows and slept uneasily.

In the light of day, I woke to Pat’s birthday and found the snapped mouse trap and its little victim.

But that’s not the story. It’s the spark.

Around this time of year back east in the wild lands of Braintree, winter is trying to decide whether to let the crocuses poke through or continue to shit white cold piles of snow.

Pat’s house sat next to a small swath of woods. Winter sent rodent-shaped refuges seeking shelter from its storms to terrorize Pat.

Pat became unglued. Agitated. Beside herself, Petrified. Absolutely batshit-around-the-bend-crazy-scared-out-of-her-mind at any little field mouse that might poke a whiskered nose out or scurry across the linoleum. She’d practically levitate to the ceiling climbing on chairs and cabinets and counters away from real and imagined threats and call me to come over to save her.

Side note. Pat didn’t call me much. It was a Mountain not coming to Mohamed, Mohamed going to the mountain kind of thing. I called her, she did not call me.

But fear of mice tossed protocol out the door. She would call for emergency help.

I would come by and set traps. Then, I would have to come back, check the traps, and clear away the dead.

Truth be told, inside I may only be a step or two away from Pat’s terror. I’ve felt on edge for days. Corners are all full of potential enemies lurking and watching. The mice feel my fear and are waiting to attack. I hear them breathing.

I can gird my loins and battle, if I must. My rational brain struggles with my irrational revulsion and fear, but I can do what must be done.

One winter, I went to Pat’s house to check the trap I set.

She wouldn’t enter the room. She pointed and shouted at me to do something from another room. She yelled orders from the other side of the house, telling me where the broom and dustpan were and a paper bag and the garbage bags and maybe some Lysol and napalm for good measure.

I braced myself and swept the former beast into the paper bag. I rolled up the bag. I put that paper bag into a garbage bag and tied the garbage back tightly shut.

With my morbid package, I walked to the kitchen toward Pat for my disposal orders.

Pat lost her mind!

She leapt. Leapt like the best leaping thing. Gazelle or hare or cheetah?

Pat leapt onto the kitchen counter, hugging the side of the refrigerator and cabinets for balance, and screaming bloody murder. She accused me of trying to terrorize her. She accused me of threatening her. She accused me of trying to kill her.

She banished me from the kitchen, from the living room, onto the porch, into the yard, onto the street. I could not return without proof my hands were empty and the dead mouse was removed.

(I can’t remember if I got away with putting it in an outside garbage can or if I had to put it in my trunk and drive away with it eventually.)

Back to today.

I have so much more to say, but I’ve hit the midnight hour and just missed hitting publish on Pat’s day. This story is one of many that still resonate inside my head like they just happened.

She’s been gone now 21 years this January. I can now say the year with conviction, because my brother Danny finally took care of unfinished business that all of her children had neglected.

Pat is buried next to her Earl under the gravestone she erected for Earl with spare room on the stone’s face to add her name. For the last couple of decades, though, like the tomb of the unknown soldier, her name wasn’t there above her head. Danny fixed that. If you find yourself at Braintree Cemetery, you can find Pat and Earl together.

I imagine you could also visit the family that also is there as a mystery incantation from my childhood, grave markers in a row that say “Father,” “Mother,” “Sister,” “Charlie.” I will always wonder about Charlie.

Wee tim’rous beastie, go fuck yourself

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 I am a wreck.

I am not Bobby Burns, writing an ode despairing man’s cruel dominion over nature.  Nope, I want the mouses dead.  Dead. Dead.  Stiff, widowed, toes up.  I want patricide, matricide, infanticide, generations of you wriggling, poohing, dirty things off the mortal cool.  Anything short of moribund or better post mortem is not enough.

Somewhere in the universe if there is energy or spirit left lingering from the living soul that was my mother Pat, she is laughing loud and long at my misery.  It’s a cosmic joke begun decades ago as she cursed my very soul for her four-legged mini tormentors.

In New England, mouse are a different beast, methinks.  In the deep cold of winter, a field mouse might poke its nose into your home and sojourn there in the warmth and light with food at hand.  It’s Club Med for sure for mice in February.  

Quickly after discovery, you can box up your food, set a few traps, and the mouse Biarritz the murine spa is shut down for good.  All guests leave through the same exit, a broken neck from one late snack at the mousetrap buffet.   The episode ends and after a little cleaning, it’s a forgotten nuisance.

Periodically, not every winter but some, Pat’s house was host to a field mouse or to coming in from the cold.  They scared the ever-;pvomg shit out of her.

There were only two scenarios in my life where I can remember my mother channeling olympic speed.  The first was actually kind of wonderfully heroic.  She had at one time in her life passed the Red Cross rescue swimming certifications, and summers at the beach she’d sit in the sandchair circle with the other mothers.  But as soon as a kid seemed to have drifted out deep toward actual danger, she’d sprint to the water’s edge ready for action.

The second scenario is the point of these words.  Faced with a small rodent in her home, she could leap to a chair or countertop with an NBA-worthy vertical or run from the room in a burst of speed.  Arguably, it was the most helpless and weak that she had ever seemed to me.  Cowed by a three-inch flash of gray fur, squeezing under the counter.

When she lived alone, Pat could steel herself to buy, bait and set traps.  But there was no way in hell she’d go near the trap again, lest it had successfully fallen a victim.  Even a dead mouse was too much to bear.

She’d call me insistently to come and empty the traps.  

One day, I did my daughterly duty and came by to empty her mouse traps.  I was given a bag, a shovel and no furhter instructions.  When the very dead mouse was in the bag, which was then closed and rolled down on the top, thoroughly sealed, I went to ask my dear mother what was next.

The bag dangled in my hand, and she Usain Bolted from the room.  She ran to the bathroom and in one move, she jumped on the toilet and slammed the door. Through the closed door she screamed.  Then she screamed at me, Hysterically, she accused me of tormenting her and exercising acts of extreme cruelty.  In her version of the story, I was throwing multiple dead mice at her as she defenselessly cried for help.

It was then that she cursed me.  She accused me of bringing the mouse with me solely to hurt her.  

So here I am today.  The California mice have me beat.  They aren’t Bobby Burns’ mouse shivering I the track of his plough.  They aren’t New England field mice looking for respite from cruel winter weather.  They  are bad roommates who move in without lease or notice and shit on the floor.

I’m doing everything to clean up.  I have spent three days in a homemade hazmat suit of long sleeves coupled with rubber gloves and a bandana pulling out every corner and nook vacuuming up mountains of pellets of pooh. I’ve loaded the washing machine with loads of pillows, blankets, clothes, napkins, towels, everything that may have been touched by their creepy, dirty paws.  

A professional wildlife eradicator guy has set traps and plugged some holes.  He’s taped up a duct that was likely a mouse highway to our inside from the outside.  He’s toured our garage, our yard and crawled the full length and breadth of our crawlspace under the house leaving bait and traps.

We are having our carpets cleaned and getting help overturning every remaining place where they might have been.

The haD been An unfortunate moment in which we uncovered a nest that had me screaming horror film shrieks.  But mostly I’ve been maintaining.  Head down, I’ve been doing what needs to get done.

Until tonight.  I found my favorite measuring cup and glass bowls sprinkled with feces.  As I rinsed and threw them into the dishwasher I gagged and began to cry, completely undone.

I just want them gone.  I want this over.  I want everything to be clean again.  I want the anxiety as I peek around the corners of the room as I type this entry to subside.

And I wish my mother was here, because I am sure she wouldn’t stop gleefully laughing at my rodent driven madness.