Mighty Mice

“’Twas the week before Christmas and all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…”

Well, that’s not the way things went down at our place. 

In my last mouse post, I mentioned those destructive little buggers--who had eaten their way through my spinach bed this fall--had really stepped up their game. And did they ever! But let’s start at the beginning…

My favorite cartoon when I was a kiddo was “Mighty Mouse,” featuring a muscular, take-charge rodent wearing Superman-like togs. This mouse righted wrongs, and always got the bad guy. (My enjoyment in Mighty Mouse’s exploits was pretty predictable: I was a mousy, underweight child, perennially bossed around by my older sister.)

But there’s where my mouse fandom ends.  

I’m as revolted by rodents as the next person—although I’ve learned that living in the country means that mice are inescapable. My most memorable mouse encounter was back in the day, which I relate in my memoir Little Farm in the Foothills.

For a couple of months, my then-husband, my baby and I lived in a drafty old mobile home in the middle of a dairy farm. When we moved in, nearly every horizontal surface was sprinkled with mouse droppings.

You’d think that would have been my first clue, to store all my food in mouse-proof containers.

But what did I know? I was a city girl. Anyway, one chilly December evening I opened my kitchen cupboard, filled with food wrapped in plastic—and caught a mouse by surprise. It jumped on me and ran down my leg!

Let me tell you, there was some shrieking—and I felt that sensation on my leg for years.

Fast forward to present day: my husband John and I will soon celebrate 17 years living in the Foothills. All this time—save for discovering some mouse droppings under the bathroom sink many years ago—all our mouse incursions have been outside the house.

These little critters, their droppings, and their nests are pretty much everywhere: in our shop, the woodsheds, and the carport, in every corner, cranny, and hidey hole.

A straw bale in the chicken coop shed once made for a very hospitable mouse abode, judging from the day I was fetching some feed and a mouse jumped out of the straw and dived into my muck boot. You can bet I tore off that boot and flung it away.

The sensation of a mouse wiggling against the top of my foot was one I also felt for years.

Mice have even invaded our car engine, finding their way to the air filter, which they chewed for nesting material. But let me stress: all those mice were outside.

So, just like I had been lo, those many years ago, I was confident our house was mouse-proof. That being the case, we stored lots of food stored flimsy plastic bags. And one week before Christmas, after stocking up on holiday items, the pantry was filled to the brim.

John and I had just arrived home, weary after a seven-hour drive from my daughter’s house. We trudged through the icy pathway to our house, schlepping my suitcase and totes and the bags of groceries we’d bought before the last leg of our trip.

I was trying to figure out how to stuff more groceries into our already-full pantry when I saw something on the lowest shelf.

A small dark flash, then a tail. It streaked out of sight.

My heart stopped. “Oh, s&%#!” I scrambled backward before the mouse could jump on me. “John!” I yelled. “There’s a mouse in the pantry!”

Running over from the living room, he said incredulously, “A mouse?”

We both peered into pantry. “I don’t see anything,” said John, cautiously moving pantry items out of the way. 

I kept my eyes peeled, but I didn’t see anything either. For a second, I felt ridiculous. Had the mouse been a figment of my tired imagination?

“Maybe it was a salamander,” I ventured. In my mind’s eye, I could still see the intruder’s dark-gray skinny tail. I’d seen plenty of salamanders in the rocks bordering the shop, and inside it too. And this critter definitely had a skinny, potentially salamander-ish tail.

Okay, I was doing my Pollyanna thing again—trying to think positive. Still, we had never, ever had mice in our kitchen.

As John cleared more pantry space (I didn’t have the courage to do it, afraid of the mouse-down-the-leg replay), I couldn’t delude myself. Behind every plastic-wrapped food item were tiny, tell-tale (tell-tail?) tiny black bits, unmistakable against the white pantry shelves.

Mouse evidence in my pantry!

Mouse droppings. My heart sank all the way to my dog-tired toes.

What now? I hoped our presence had scared the mouse enough to sneak back to wherever it had come from and leave us alone.

But I knew one thing: I wasn’t going to put any more groceries in my contaminated pantry! I stuck them back in their paper bags and left the bags in the middle of the kitchen floor. 

Surely no rodent would be bold enough to cross the floor right under our feet!

To be continued.... 

I'll post the rest of the story next week here at the Little Farm in the Foothills blog. Or, you can find the full post right now in my latest Little Farm Writer Substack! 

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