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Squeaking by in my kitchen
(by Tracy Beckerman - July 16, 2008)
I am a pretty strong woman. Not strong like, “Look at me lift my weight in Oreo cookies” strong, but strong like brave. It takes a lot to knock me for a loop. I once wrestled a mugger for my gym bag. I had one child without anesthesia. And I’ve taken care of two sick children and a sick husband while I recovered from oral surgery.
So I was really kind of shocked by my reaction one day when I flung open my silverware drawer to grab a fork and a mouse popped out.
It flew. I screamed. It ran under the sink. I jumped up on a chair. Then I called up my husband at work and cried.
He laughed.
“How can you laugh?” I demanded. “This monster rodent jumped out of our utensils drawer at me. It could have bitten me. It could have rabies. It probably got its rabies-ridden-rodent-germs all over our forks and knives!!!”
“What is it, like two inches long?” he asked.
I was really annoyed. But then I wondered: What the heck was so scary about a little mouse, anyway? Spiders, of course, make sense. (My spider fears have been well-documented in this column.) But a mouse?
I realized a lot of my hysteria had to do with the element of surprise. I had been expecting a fork, not a mouse when I opened the drawer. Plus, I was also under the obviously erroneous assumption that if I kept a clean house, it would be free of small animals, insects and other uninvited guests (extended family excluded). Unfortunately, some time between when I had relocated from the cockroach-infested city to the mouse-populated suburbs, I had convinced myself that just because we were trading up didn’t mean that the vermin weren’t trading up as well.
My neighbors bragged about skunks under their decks, raccoons in their garages, and even a gaggle of wild turkeys in one friend’s back yard. Of course the turkeys were pretty benign compared to the black bear that strolled through a couple of neighborhoods in her town. True, a mouse in my drawer is not a bear in my backyard. Then again, the bear didn’t get into her cooking utensils and leave little bits of evidence behind that he had been there.
So, I did what any self-respecting, vermin-hating, homemaking woman would do. I bought some humane traps, handed them to my husband, and said, “Get rid of it.”
He baited one and left it under the sink and then we all went to sleep reassured that our home sweet home would soon be mouse-free.
The next morning my husband left for work, I took the kids to school, and we all just kind of forgot about “it.”
…Until later that morning when I reached under the sink to grab a sponge. I heard a squeak, and suddenly it all came back to me. This time however, there was a steel cage between me and Stuart Little. Emboldened by the iron bars between us, I peered in at this dangerous wild animal that threatened the sanctity and sanitariness of my home. It stared at me with big, frightened eyes and trembled against the back of the cage.
As I pulled the cage out from under the sink, I reassured the mouse in soothing tones that he was not about to meet his great mouse-maker. I slipped a few pieces of the kids’ string cheese between the bars, then I drove way out to a park five miles from my house — just in case he was a homing mouse — and let him go.
Filled with a great sense of bravery and accomplishment, I called my husband to give him the good news.
“It’s all over,” I told him giddily. “We got the mouse!”
“That’s great honey,” he replied. “I’m glad we caught one. We’ll reset the trap tonight to get the rest.”
The rest?
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