Notes from an Urban Cabin #19 | Well, that puts the "cabin" in urban cabin (or a very long post after my first anniversary here)
I was sitting at the dining table writing Saturday night when I sensed the cat rushing behind me and heard an odd sound.
I looked over my shoulder. She was under my desk, maybe three feet behind me, and the strange sound was coming from the mouse in her mouth.
I've had Lydia for more than seven years, and I've never seen her with a mouse. I've also never seen a mouse in my home. Roaches, brown recluse spiders, and a dead skink on the balcony, sure, but no rodents. (Not since that winter in the 1980s when two mice must've ridden our Christmas tree into my parents' home. Oh, and that time in the 1990s when a previous cat was spending a lot of time sitting near the grate under the furnace, and we discovered a nest of baby mice in there.)
I made some odd sounds, too, as a cat-and-mouse game ensued.
You know that gag in the Family Circus comic strip, the dotted line depicting the ridiculously meandering route little Billy takes to do a simple task? I now have a mental picture of such a dotted line from my desk to the front door to the middle of the room to the corner dining area to the floor below the picture window and back to the kitchen, with a loop-de-loop to a baseboard crack beside the dishwasher where, despite the cat's best efforts, the mouse escaped.
I shut the bedroom door and started to shut the bathroom door, then on second thought, urgently invited the cat to bring the mouse into the bathroom, where we could contain it. Like the time a bird got in a house I shared with someone who's terrified of birds, and I managed to sequester it in the laundry room, then shoo it out the open window.
The cat looked at me like "And then what's the plan?" So I grabbed a Tupperware and tried to trap the mouse under it, but I couldn't ever get close enough. And when the mouse touched my foot, I really made some strange sounds.
Did you know that mice can jump? For a second, I thought maybe a neighbor's pet kangaroo mouse had gotten loose. And the idea that it was a pet, with a name, made it momentarily seem a little less gross and freaky than it seemed initially, and seems now. (The mouse's escape route is inches away from the cat's perpetually filled dish of crunchy food. Ew.)
Once the mouse disappeared, Lydia settled down in the kitchen and kept watch. I put down the Tupperware and picked up the phone.
If this were a rural cabin, and it weren't so late at night, I'd probably call or stroll over to a neighbor's place to ask about mouse control strategies — or I would already know what to do because I'd already experienced it. But this is a new thing for me.
I called my rental company's emergency maintenance number. The woman on call said she could come the next day with some traps and show me how to bait them. That wasn't soon enough.
I called the supermarket a mile and a half away. "You're open all night, right?" Yes. "Do you sell mouse traps?" Aisle 13.
And I did the other thing we do when we want help deciding something or just want someone to commiserate. I texted a couple of night-owl friends and posted on Facebook, with an angry-faced emoji and a single word: "Mouse."
Someone responded with the laughing-so-hard-I'm-crying emoji, then apologized for it. I'll laugh someday, I said, but not tonight. People recommended styles of traps (including a live-catch-and-release kind), asked whether the cat could dispatch it, suggested repelling it with cotton balls soaked in peppermint oil and stopping up the point of entry with steel wool.
It was after midnight, and well past my usual bedtime, but somehow I wasn't sleepy. I drove to the store, found the traps, looked at the various styles and chose a two-pack (there were many choices, and they were sold out of the familiar wood-based snap traps), got peanut butter to bait it with (I was out of PB, and it took me longer to settle on a jar than it did to choose a trap (why is everyone adding sugar to the mix these days? Doesn't anyone still simply mash up peanuts?)), swung by the dairy section for eggs (look! the store-brand large eggs are only 49 cents a dozen) and checked out.
I followed the directions and set one trap in front of the crack where the mouse had disappeared, barricading it from the cat with a collection of water bottles and empty glass jars. I set the other in the cabinet under the sink, where I keep the kitchen trash. Then I went to bed around 1:30 hoping to sleep but expecting a loud SNAP! in the middle of the night.
*** There's no shortage of advice on what to do about a mouse in the house, some of it contradictory. (READER ALERT: Here be dragons. Skip this paragraph if you're easily grossed out or fine with not knowing what you're missing.) Mouse trap manufacturers have a lot to say about it, as do exterminators. Go to an animal-loving website and you'll read about what charming, winsome, thinking and emoting creatures rodents are, how fastidious about personal hygiene, even cleaner than a house pet; you'll find advice on persuading them to move on to another B&B, and on peacefully coexisting with them in the meantime. Go to the CDC and you'll read about all the diseases they carry (including salmonella, hantavirus, leptospirosis, tularemia, and the plague), the fact that they have no bladder control (therefore they pee as they go, which turns that dotted line in my living space into a mine field), and detailed information about how to clean up their feces after infestations and how to dispose of the corpses, requiring rubber gloves, disinfectants, double bagging and other precautions.
However, there are not, as far as I can tell, instructions on how to disinfect your cat.
For a passing moment that night, I thought of knocking on a neighbor's door. I'm on friendly terms with several folks on my floor, but it would have been impolite to knock so late at night. Honestly, though, I'm not sure I would have knocked even if it were earlier. What would I have said or asked? Would I have alarmed them more than anything else, especially the two neighbors who share a wall with me?
I have a dream of a cabin in the country. Depending on where I situated it, it might be within view of as few as two neighbors' homes. That's one kind of isolation. Here in the city, where I can see hundreds of abodes from one window alone, there's a different kind of isolation. Which is why a handful of friends and family know about the mice, but only two of them from a face-to-face conversation.
And that brings me to a book I've been reading and can hardly put down: The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love by Kristin Kimball.
Kimball, a New York City writer, went to interview a guy named Mark about organic farming. Before he'd consent to an interview, he put her to work. She fell in love with farming, and him, and eventually they both moved and started a farm together. As the book jacket says, "In her old life, Kimball would stay out until four a.m., wear heels, and carry a handbag. Now she wakes up at four, wears Carhartts, and carries a pocket knife."
When they moved to tiny Essex, 280 miles north of NYC, the locals' customs were stranger to her than those in any of the cities she'd traveled to around the globe. The book is an irresistible read for me for many reasons — their unlikely love story, her about-face change of life, the descriptions of the food they grow and cook, her writing voice and storytelling — but I think the parts I will keep thinking about are the ones where she sheds assumptions and learns how much she has to learn about all kinds of things, and people. This section comes right after she accomplishes her given task of moving pigs from one barn to another, but hides from Mark the fact that to do it, she sawed a hole in a perfectly good barn wall.
As I patched the barn with scrap lumber, pig-tight but ugly, I was forced to confront my own prejudice. I had come to the farm with the unarticulated belief that concrete things were for dumb people and abstract things were for smart people. I thought the physical world—the trades—was the place you ended up if you weren’t bright or ambitious enough to handle a white-collar job. Did I really think that a person with a genius for fixing engines, or for building, or for husbanding cows, was less brilliant than a person who writes ad copy or interprets the law? Apparently I did, though it amazes me now. I ordered books from the library about construction, plumbing, and electricity, and discovered that reading them was like trying to learn in a foreign language, the simplest things — the names of unknown tools or hardware, the names for parts of structures — creating dead ends that required answers, more research. There's no better cure for snobbery than a good ass kicking.
When she was sawing that hole while her husband was away on a trip, a kind neighbor stopped by, as he often did, sometimes bearing gifts — a cake or a piece of equipment he knew they could use. And he said what he often said in such situations: "I don't want to want to tell you what to do." Then he told her she was using a hacksaw, and suggested she might want a wood saw. Diplomatic. Neighborly.
The thing is, she's the one doing the kicking.
***
Sunday morning, I woke bleary with the light at 5:30, fed the cat, and checked the traps. Reader, they worked. Both of them. I did what needed to be done, washed up, went back to bed and slept like a rock for four more hours.
I bought more Sunday afternoon, the simple kind with the steel spring on a wooden base, and set them. While I was writing this Sunday night, I heard a SNAP! and scuttling, then nothing. I did what I needed to and went back to writing, then to bed.
This morning I can tell you I don't know which is more disconcerting — to find a dead mouse, or to find that the peanut butter has been licked clean from three traps that didn't spring.
***
In the country, I imagine, one face-to-face conversation about my mice would mean everyone would know. I hope it would be the kind of community where people would be sympathetic and kind and neighborly about whatever new-to-me task I was taking on. And I hope I would accept that my being wrong about something is just that — being wrong, which happens to all of us, and is not necessarily catastrophic or a character flaw.
But that's not the neighborhood I live in now. Yet my hope is the same wherever I live. I want to be patient and attentive to the older people I live among, to appreciate them, to learn from them, not to be patronizing. I want the young people at the cash registers not to be impatient or dismissive with me when I accidentally cancel a debit card transaction because I thought I was pushing the button that meant I don't want cash back, or when I'm paying with cash and taking the time to count out exact change. I want us all to be kind to one another. And to ourselves.
That last one means if I have a mouse problem partly because I let my housekeeping standards slide for the month I was away from home a lot, tending to the needs of my aunt while she was in a hospital and then a rehab facility, then I simply accept my responsibility and fix it. No self-kicking.
And when I see that I have been holding on to a false assumption — often on the same day that I've quick to correct someone else's assumption — neighborliness means I can say I'm wrong, and if necessary, say I'm sorry.
Since the last TinyLetter, I've marked a year here. (The urban cabin grounds gave me a happy anniversary card in the form of the first daylilies blooming on June 6.) When I moved here, I had some false assumptions, and some unrealistic expectations. Maybe I'll write more about those later, maybe not. If you're still reading this far down, well, I've taken enough of your time today. Thank you. I'll just say I've learned a lot, and I'm still learning. There are corrections to the course.
I didn't expect to spend so much time in hospitals these past three months. And I didn't expect to be learning about mouse eradication. But this is the life I have, the life I've chosen, and the one I choose to live, day by day. As she settles herself on the table, right next to the keyboard, I'm still wondering about disinfecting the cat.