In early 2005, I became aware of a situation on my property: I had mice. When I first found a small, dead furry thing on the front porch, I blamed it on the neighbor's cat. My cat, Gabrielle, had been going outside for years and this had never happened! I had heard of these situations but had never had to deal with such a thing before. This was something that happened to other people, like having a lying spouse.
So I didn't look down onto the porch, nor go out the front door, nor get my mail, until I could get my fiancé to get rid of it when he was here on the weekend. I couldn’t stand to look at it! Disgusting! Gross!
Then it happened again, a second dead "gift" on the doormat. I left it there for a few days, until I finally wanted to get the mail. I stepped around it artfully without looking down, only allowing the doormat to enter my peripheral vision in a non-focused way. I’m not sure what the mail carrier thought at this point, with dead mice on the doorstep all week.
The third time it happened, I brought myself to kick the doormat off the side of the porch and into the bushes, so I wouldn't have to look at the dead furry thing. Then I just didn’t look near the bushes when I went out to get the mail. My fiancé again retrieved it and disposed of it when he visited. It was a little harder to find it among the mulch, but he did. I wondered if these creatures were just dying on my doorstep for some reason.
Eventually, my cat, Gabrielle, was caught bringing a mostly-dead mouse into the house from outside, and I could no longer be in denial about my sweet kitty's killer tendencies. Actually, it was a compliment and a testament to our relationship that she loves her mommy enough to leave her such trophies! Luckily, it was the weekend and I screamed for my fiancé as I ran out of the room. He went in, gave up a small scream himself, and then disposed of the little thing somehow. I didn’t want to know the details.
That seemed to be the end of it; I found no more dead furry things. Either Gab was a wonderful hunter and she caught the few that there were, or she was a lousy hunter and I didn’t realize that we were infested. I didn’t know, and blissfully resisted thinking about it. Spring settled in and then summer simmered. My fiancé came in for the weekends, then went back to his city during the week, as had been our routine for two years.
Fall came and with it change, often unwelcome and unexpected. One evening, I went to call Gabrielle out of the garage, her favorite outdoor place in cold weather. I found her playing with a mouse on the roof of my car!! The question of whether she got it up there, or caught it up there, briefly crossed my mind before my recoil reflex kicked in. Yuck!! A mouse on my car!!
I had startled Gab by opening the door and she jumped down to enter the house. I prayed that the mouse, now freed, would be able to escape. But it just lay there. I let Gabrielle inside and closed the door tightly.
“Dammit!” I thought to myself. “How am I going to get rid of a dead mouse by myself?” It was a week night, so I did not have my fiancé to turn to. I needed the car to go to work in the morning, so I couldn’t just ignore this, like I did the mice on the front porch.
If I tried backing the car out of the garage in the morning and driving away fast, the mouse would surely fall off, but where? What if it fell on my lawn, and I encountered it with my lawnmower later? What if it fell on my driveway or in my garage, and I had to see it again – or, worse, deal with a squished dead mouse? No, avoidance wouldn’t work; the situation had to be dealt with.
I thought about calling in one of the neighbors to do it, but in thinking about which one to approach, I suddenly felt sheepish. “You should do this yourself,” I told myself. Maybe it was my inner feminist talking. “You own a house now, you need to learn to deal with things like this. You can do this! It’s just a dead little mouse.” Then my mom’s voice took over in my mind. “It’s not going to hurt you – it’s more afraid of you than you are of it!” That was the “mom message” for live animals and live bugs, it made no sense for dead ones. Well, I guess it did – it couldn’t hurt me if it was dead, either.
So then I started thinking of the best method to accomplish this on my own. Perhaps I could sweep it into a bag without really looking at it? Yeah, that’s a good idea! No muss, no fuss. Me at one end of a long broom handle, and the mouse on the other end. I could position the bag on the ground, shove the broom toward the mouse from the other side of the car, and it could fall off the car and into the bag! I grabbed the broom and a bag, and courage I didn’t know I had, and stepped into the garage.
There was no denying it, there was still a small furry lump on the roof of the car. It hadn’t moved at all; it was really dead and not going to jump up like a possum. I quickly realized, however, that using a broom was like shooting a cannon to kill a fly – too big and too hard to control.
I exchanged the broom for a dustpan and approached again. The reach of the dustpan would mean that I would have to get really close to the dead rodent. Then another realization occurred to me: I couldn’t avoid looking directly at the mouse as I was sweeping it into the bag. If I tried to look away, it might miss the bag, and, worse, I might sweep it onto myself! OK, I was going to have to watch what I was doing, literally. “You can do this. You can do this. It’s not so terrible – every day, people have to suffer far worse things than this. You can do this.”
I delicately approached the car with the dustpan and bag in hand. I carefully, slowly, opened the car door without jarring the car and moving the thing's body, so that I had an edge under which I could place the bag. I stepped around the open car door and advanced slowly, trying not to breathe. As I got closer, I silently prayed, “Please, do not let it fall into my car!” I got close enough to position the dustpan behind the dead thing.
Then I couldn’t resist looking any more. And I was confronted by the visage of the dead mouse. I could see clearly its little mouse whiskers and the tiny teeth that made up its overbite; its beady, glassy little eyes; its scrawny little fingers on its scrawny little hands. It was dead, but it once had been alive, and it had been one of nature’s little creatures. A well of compassion opened in me. Somehow, in looking at it, it became not a “threat” but just a thing. A curious thing that was now dead. It was just reality.
I swept the mouse into the bag, rolled up the bag, opened my garbage can, and tossed it in. I did it! It was over! It didn’t touch me, and I didn’t die from it! I was so relieved.
Since that incident, I haven’t had to deal with any more mice, alive or dead. I called a critter control company that sent a guy to close up some holes and leave some poison bait. Why I didn’t do this before, I don’t know; I guess it seemed easier to avoid looking at an unpleasant situation that I wasn’t ready to examine.
But unpleasant situations rarely go away by themselves, and that’s when decisions are called for. We find an inner strength we didn’t know we had. Soon after, I broke up with my fiancé, after months of dissatisfaction and indecision. In really “seeing” situations, sometimes we find out that that the solution is much easier to handle than the grief of the ongoing problem. We can find and use our own power. That’s how I met the mouse.
