🪤 Mouse in the House
Even the biggest dreams come with vexing new problems
“Ownership of all kinds is a precarious business at best, or at worst, a form of self-delusion.”
—James R. Guthrie via Eula Biss’s book, Having and Being Had
“How are things going with the move-in?” our retired upstairs neighbors asked after we bumped into them in the hallway of our now-shared brownstone. We had just moved into the third floor unit a week earlier, mid-Winter of February 2019.
“Well, we have a mouse in the house,” Michael and I replied.
They looked at each other and smirked, not unkindly. You’re probably thinking the same thing they were: there is no such thing as *a* mouse. Where there’s one, there’s more, as we would soon find out.
Michael and I had gotten married at City Hall four months earlier, and I purchased the apartment after squirreling away a few years of Pivot-related earnings, fortunate to receive a little extra help from family, too. It was a big risk for a big dream, but I was flush(er) with cash then, not realizing my business earnings were peaking and I that would take home less than half for each of the next five years.
Mice were not listed in the previous owners’ disclosures, and I hadn’t ever had to deal with them before. I lived in an apartment building downtown for seven years, and felt grateful (even, shamefully, a bit smug) when I saw the annual pest control sign-up sheets taped next to the elevators. The list filled with entries from the lower floors: 3F, 2A, 1C, 11D. In all the time I lived in 9C, I was fortunate to only see cockroaches twice (ninth floor privilege), and even luckier that someone else was around to help kill them, as I am utterly incapable of dealing with the enormous flying ones on my own.
Mice are nocturnal, so it’s not always obvious that you have them, but they do leave clues. If you search the corners of closets or behind appliances, where they enter and huddle for warmth, piles of tiny scat accumulate. But first, you have to have a reason to check those places.
“We were the guests at that point,” Michael says now, looking back.
He is a night owl, happily staying up until three a.m.. One night he saw something dart across the living room. Mouseino, Michael nicknamed him, appending a Lebanese term of endearment, thinking it was just the one. If anything, Michael was happy we had a mouse, gushing, “They are so cute!” No urgency to solve the situation. If anything, he would have loved to build a playpen paradise for him. Him. Still thinking it was just the one; still naive city-dwellers then.
On the days that I woke up super early, three or four a.m., I would hear little mouse conferences to my left and right while reading in the dark. Skittering, doing whatever it is mice do, wondering how and when they should make a run for the kitchen crumbs. I rarely saw them, I just knew I wanted them gone.
We called an exterminator, but asked them not to spray poison, just to cover holes. It felt cruel to fumigate the innocent little mammals (roll your eyes if you must), and besides, that wouldn’t solve much, given that who-knows-how-many-more were living in the walls. Spraying would’ve been Sisyphean and costly, solving the symptom not the problem, merely killing one generation until the next reappeared.
The Pest Control guy half-hazardously sprayed foam, moving glacially from one appliance opening to the next. Even while he was still working, now out a few hundred dollars, Michael and I made silent eye contact, knowing he hadn’t solved anything.
Sure enough, nothing changed. As a next step, rather than setting up metal traps or sticky paper—I absolutely could not have handled finding either one, and both seemed overly cruel—we searched for humane traps, placing the little translucent green “mouse hotels” around the kitchen and living room so we could catch-and-release the mice back into the park.
For Michael, finding one in the morning was like Christmas, usually the babies who hadn’t wisened up yet. However, soon the traps mysteriously stopped working. We didn’t know that once you’ve caught one, the mouse releases alarm pheromones into the trap, alerting its friends to steer clear. So each “hotel” is really only good once. (I’m not sure if vigorous washing does the trick—it never did for us.)
For five months, Mouseino and his friends continued conferencing at night, and it drove me crazy. They weren’t causing harm, per se, but I wanted them gone. They were so small, but the problem loomed large, and I knew it would only get worse. Perhaps this was the first sign that even the biggest dreams, once realized, come with new problems attached, requiring both ingenuity and acceptance.
We scoured every wall again for holes. Did you know that, due to mice’s flexible spines, they can fit inside a hole smaller than a dime?! A dime!1 Well, once we moved our lumbering HVAC unit off the wall, we finally cracked the case: