About my house mouse
As some of you know, I had a mouse event last month. While sitting in my bedroom, I saw a medium-size, dark brown thing run in and then back out. What followed was a binge of buying mouse abatement products – some old-fashioned traps and a single glue trap.
I object to glue traps because they don’t put the mouse out of its misery immediately, but the suspicious area near the washing machine seemed to need such a way to catch our furry friend. The trap was the size of a playing card, its surface covered in a shiny, neon-green goo.
I’ve often thought the stickiest substance on the planet is honey, something I’m reminded of each time I pour some into my hot tea. Try getting honey on your fingers and then reaching for a paper towel to clean up a spill: you end up stuck to something that feels like paper mache. The honey dries to an industrial-grade adhesive that must be peeled off in crumbs, like a price tag on a glass picture frame.
Compared to the green mousetrap goo, a honey smudge is as slippery as the rug that keeps getting caught under my front door. That green goo does not simply lie in wait; it has the power to reach out and grab things, something I learned the hard way.
One night I decided to toss in a load of laundry. A sock escaped from the basket and landed in the tight space between the washer and the wall. Forgetting that the glue trap was there, I reached down to grab the sock and touched the trap. When I stood back up, my fingers were glued to the trap, along with the sock and also a sizable wad of dryer lint.
So began my effort to disentangle myself from the evil green goo. I grabbed the plastic part of the trap and tried to pull it away from my skin, but the goo refused to let go. I twisted the trap hoping the stalactites of goo would snap off, but they held tight – in fact pulling themselves back toward my hand. I thought about cutting the goo with scissors, but then we would have yet another object jammed up in this crisis.
Walking to the garage to look for some solvent or something, I touched my leg and now the glue had trapped a wad on my nightie. You know how when kneading a bread or cookie dough, everything starts to stick to your hands and you’re losing ground as you use one hand to pull the dough away from between the fingers on the other hand? This was not that.
This was molten tar. This was a disaster at the taffy-pull factory. A wad of bubble gum stuck in a dreadlock. This was a jeep swallowed up in a lava flow.
In the end, I tore a hole in my thin cotton nightie, ripped the glue off my hand and buried the trap in the backyard. Kidding, but I did bury it deep, deep in the trash can, wrapped in sheets of newspaper. I will never see that sock again.
And the mouse? I’ve not seen any signs of it, either. I can’t know his motives, but whatever the mouse had planned, it was not as destructive as my plan to get rid of him. But just in case he decides to take another spin through the house, I’ve set an old-fashioned snap trap in the space beside the washer, baited with cheese. Remind me not to reach down there.