And I Was So Excited About Not Having Cockroaches

About two weeks ago, on a Friday night, Clayton and I were spending the evening lazying it up on the couch. Apparently, Friday evenings can put some little creatures hard at work, and one of those happened to catch my eye as it scurried from under the bathroom door, around the corner of the wall to the kitchen, and right up under the stove. Yes. I saw it with my very own eyes — the fuzzy grey fur, the long, pale tail. We had a mouse. In our house. And I saw it.

Whatever reaction you’re imagining, I probably handled it much worse. The next half hour was spent drilling imaginary holes through the oven with my laser stare that I refused to remove from the exact spot where I last saw the mouse. I had the very logical reasoning that if I didn’t move, neither would little mouseketeer. At the same time, I tried to stuff my knees farther and farther into my esophagus to keep my toes as far as possible from the floor. Because mice will chew off your toenails. I’m pretty sure I read that somewhere.

My darling hero of a husband cleaned out the pot drawer underneath the stove and cleared out all the lower cabinets just to prove his theory that the mouse was no longer under the stove but had escaped back into the hidden mouse kingdom he’s been maintaining behind our walls. He appeared to be right, even though I HADN’T STOPPED LOOKING AT THE SPOT. Clayton put on a brave face, but I saw the way he stayed up on his toes, ready to hurdle the kitchen counter if necessary. No one likes a mouse. In their house.

So, we made a midnight trip to Wal-Mart and stocked up on several different kinds of mouse traps. For two people with a combined three and a half college degrees, that was one of the most confusing experiences of our lives. I don’t know if it’s a tribute to the endless supply of American consumerism or a scary indication of how sadistic we can be, but there were like 17 different options to kill a mouse. You can poison them, trap them on a sticky mat, capture them in a disc, or simply lure them with peanut butter and break their neck. We went with the peanut butter.

Our first stop the next morning was the front office of our apartment complex. As horrified as the office worker was, she said the earliest anyone could treat our apartment would be the following Friday. A week to live with a mouse in our house. We complained and called during the week, but the pest guy still didn’t show up until Friday. And my calves were looking better than they ever have from walking around for 7 straight days on my toes. The “professional” pest control technician put down traps with the sticky mat about three inches away from the traps we had already placed around the apartment. Good work, team. And then we learned another valuable lesson about catching mice: you can’t. You put out your peanut butter, and you wait. Every morning you have to peak with one eye into the cracks and corners where the traps are set, partly hoping the little bugger will be in there and also, as a general life rule,  not really wanting to see a dead rodent. So the traps had been out for a few days and we’d begun to live life normally again, almost walking flat-footed, albeit a bit more conscious of falling asleep with leftovers scattered around the kitchen.

And then Tuesday night I heard a very unsettling noise coming from the kitchen. Under the stove. Clayton had fallen asleep on the couch, and I was working on an assignment for class. I didn’t want to wake Clayton up for nothing, so I tiptoed to the kitchen counter, staying as far away from the stove as I possibly could while still being able to see around the corner. Nothing. About 45 minutes later, I heard the pots shift again, and then I heard the snap. It was muffled, and I wasn’t exactly sure, but deep down I think I knew what had just happened to Mr. Whiskerfritz. I peeked around the corner again, just to say I’d done it, but I didn’t come even close to touching anything in that kitchen. I hated to wake Clayton up, so I finished my assignment and waited to see if I would wake from this kooky, totally-foreign-to-a-Floridian dream. No such luck. I gave Clayton a little shake and tried to explain to his half-asleep mind what I thought had happened. And my husband came through yet again. And I didn’t question his sanity for doing it barefoot. Again. He went to the kitchen and looked in the traps next to the refrigerator, but they were clear. He pulled out the pot drawer for the second time, and our problem was solved. In a peanut butter trap. Furry butt up in the air. The next half hour became a sitcom-worthy scenario of trying to figure out how to dispose of little Fievel. Eventually he made it to the dumpster, along with one of our yellow latex cleaning gloves, and my feet made it back down to the floor after my hamstrings started to cramp from an hour of constant flexing.

At this point, I’m telling myself we had a mouse problem, not a mice problem, so that I can sleep at night. But just to be sure, that trap by the head of my bed is staying put.