An Unwelcome Visitor

There are some reactions you can't plan. You just don't know what you will do when presented with a situation that you haven't seen before. For example, what would you do if a mouse ran across your family room while you were watching tv?

My wife jumped up and stood on the couch. I thought that only happened in the movies or in a comic book. But that was her reaction. Right up on the cushions. And she didn't put her feet on the floor until the next morning.

I chased our rodent invader downstairs into the basement, where we proceeded to play a game of flashlight hide-and-seek until he darted behind the pile of boxes and disappeared. We have never had any animals inside the house before. Water, yes. Gallons. But animals? They usually stay outside and dig up the lawn. I searched for signs that our new visitor had moved in permanently, but I found nothing. No wood shavings, no droppings, no little yellow shoes or little white gloves. I was convinced that the mouse had just wandered in, and none of his animated friends had followed. Even so, my wife could think of nothing worse than having this thing in our home. We're not running a rodent motel.

The next morning, my wife went shopping. She came back with an arsenal of anti-mouse weapons the likes of which had never been seen. We could have eradicated the entire population of mice on the eastern seaboard with the collection of snap traps, sticky pads and poisons that she purchased.

I didn't think we needed to use all of armaments at the same time, so I selected a few of them and got out the Jif. My favorite was an update to the classic wooden snap mouse trap. It was plastic, and it kind of looked like an oversized bag clip. You know, the thing that keeps your Cheetos fresh. We (I) baited the traps and set them in places where we had seen the little guy running.

I woke up the next morning and it was done. No more fuzzy visitor. Well, he was still there, but his interest in peanut butter had gotten him inescapably stuck in the bag clip. My wife didn't want to know any details. Just that the mouse had checked out.

She is still in the process of cleaning everything we own with anti-bacterial Lysol. "It is gross to think about a live rodent walking around in our house," she said. While she couldn't help jumping onto the couch when she first saw it, my wife has since been able to decide on her reaction to the whole situation.

We're moving. We have to. There was a mouse in our house.