Baba and The Mouse

Disclosure: Animals were harmed in the making of this blog. Fair warning to all PETA advocates: I support you, except for rodents (and bugs).

The mouse and my 94-year-old widowed grandmother have been cohabitating for six weeks now. It is far from a consensual arrangement. The woman survived a world war, childbirth in a 1940's Catholic hospital, a rare form of blood cancer, several hip replacements, and the loss of Downton Abbey on PBS. And yet, somehow this meager rodent has enfeebled her.  She is beside herself. And truthfully, I don’t blame her.

It started with a single squeak in the cavernous black of night. Baba flung open her eyes, alert, anxious, unsure if she had dreamt the sound. She waited, stiffened her limbs under the sheet, straining to decipher fact from fiction. When it came again, a high-pitched whimper followed by a rustling in the hall, she hollered into the vastness, her voice hoarse with age and fractured sleep. She struck her cane against the bed frame, making such a racket that her intruder wouldn’t dare mistake her room for a recreational playground. In the morning, after limping to the kitchen to brew her chicory coffee, she spotted five inky turds dotting the countertops.

Evidence.

Baba closed her eyes, remembering what her late husband had spouted over the years when they suspected vermin had breached the basement. “There’s never just one.” 

She knew right then, she was no longer alone. In fact, she was probably outnumbered.

The cavalry (aka my mother, my uncle, my siblings, my husband, I, and a few selfless neighbors) arrived in shifts throughout the next day, bearing traps, glue boards, and peanut butter. Baba drummed her fingers on her cheek, waiting for evening, picturing her nocturnal interlopers rousing from slumber, stretching their joints, their pointed noses curiously sniffing the air, now subtly perfumed by peanut oil. As she dressed for bed, Baba wishfully beckoned them out of crevices and closets and cracks, inviting their whiskers to fan out, to become bewitched by the delicacies lain bare on innocuous rectangles of wood until…SNAP.

Right before dawn, still tortured and awake, she rejoiced in the metal-clanging glory of two traps ensnaring prey. With that behind her, she was able to succumb to the delirium of early morning slumber, the peaceful sleep that rewards a host after bidding adieu to unwanted guests.

“We got them both,” she bragged into the phone a few hours later, swirling the last of her coffee in the chipped mug painted with red poppies.

I could hear the smile lingering on her face.

“I’m so glad, Baba,” I answered, cracking my neck, relieved our arsenal had worked.

It was then I heard the yelp, so suffocated I almost mistook it for a hiccup.

“There’s a third,” she strangled out, her voice low and muffled. “She’s staring at me right now from the corner of the kitchen.”

“She?” I probed, briefly amused by the assuredness with which my grandmother had assigned the feminine pronoun to an androgynous pest.

“It’s definitely a she. I killed her brother and her husband and now she’s taunting me. She knows I can’t move fast enough to catch her and now, just watch; she won’t venture onto any of the other traps.”

“Baba, that’s ridiculous. It’s a mouse. It’s brain is the size of a dust mote. The only thing she knows is instinct, not logic.” I halted, recognizing how quickly I had adopted the “she”.

“No, she’s smart,” Baba countered. “You’re not the one looking at her.”

The next morning, Baba lumbered into the kitchen and found a desecrated bag of Skinny Pop, half-gnawed popcorn kernels strewn over the linoleum. Three days later, with peanut butter dehydrating in the open air, we replaced all the traps with Skinny Pop.

“Maybe she has a nut allergy,” I suggested to my mom that evening. “She’s meticulously evaded the peanut butter, but I think she has a weakness for salt.”

My mom flashed me a wry smile. “So, you think it’s a ‘she’ too, huh?”

“I’m starting to agree with Baba. This mouse seems to possess an uncanny amount of intelligence. You know, for a varmint with an infinitesimal sized cerebrum.”

Each night thereafter, Baba listened helplessly for the third SNAP or for the frantic squeaks billowing from one of the glue strips, but the mouse avoided each pitfall as if she'd memorized the battlefield. When I came over to check on the traps, the popcorn had been stealthily stolen without activating the traps.

She was a clever old girl.

A week elapsed before we added another dozen, supplementing the bait with bacon and aged gruyere and relocating them to the mouse's favorite hangouts. Behind the microwave. Next to the fridge. Under the walnut dresser in the front bedroom.

But the cured meat failed as spectacularly as the peanut butter and popcorn.

“My neighbor thinks it’s the nitrates,” Baba lamented. “That she can smell the preservatives in the bacon.”

I shook my head, scanning the kitchen for any shadow of movement. “That’s absurd. Unless we have the Ratatouille rodent on our hands, I don’t think she’d be that picky or give a rat’s ass about the long-term health effects of sodium nitrates. Sorry, no pun intended.”

Baba didn’t laugh. I could see her weariness in how her head slumped to the side, how little she had been sleeping, her eyes clouding with exhaustion and worry. Her back sagged into the chair.

“Emily, I can’t take it anymore. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t cook without worrying about leaving behind some minuscule remnants. I can’t lay in bed at night without wondering if she’s crawling around under my mattress. I don’t feel like myself. My house isn’t my own. It’s been invaded. I feel like selling it.”

I stroked her back, smoothing the fabric of her sweater, trying to comfort, to remain steadfast in my belief that we would catch the invader—that she’d be gone by the end of the week.

The mouse had begun visiting every morning while Baba ate her breakfast. She’d scoot out from behind the oven, race along the baseboards, leap over the sticky traps, and then skid to a stop in front of the fridge, vetting the air with her whiskers.  

“This morning she almost ventured close enough to me to whack her with my cane. She peered up at me, begging for a crumb, but then I shouted for her to leave me alone and she sped into the hall.”

“We’ll get her, Baba. I know we will,” I whispered, but my voice thinned out as if afraid to make promises it couldn’t keep.

Thanksgiving came and went. Weeks elapsed. We purchased a Chinese ultrasonic rodent repeller that claimed to emit a high-pitched sound, intolerable to rodents, but inconsequential to humans and other pets. The device sounded too good to be true, but I happily paid  $29.99 through Amazon Prime and waited for our miracle to arrive via one-day shipping.  

Meanwhile, the excrement accumulated. Puny pellets resembling grains of black rice tainted everything. Countertops, bedspreads, bathroom towels, the lip of the toaster. I felt terrible. This was my grandmother, reduced to living in filth, declining from her own distress. My mom begged Baba to stay at her house, to get some fresh air, just for an hour or two, to get her hair done, but she stubbornly refused. It was as if Baba had sealed her fate with that mouse and only one of them would emerge alive.

In early December, we introduced a “humane” trap into the home and baited it with tuna and hard-boiled egg. Baba claimed to have reached the point of compromise, having explained to the mouse over breakfast that she would allow it to be captured alive and released in the forest preserve. As long as it would leave imminently, she would grant a reprieve.
         I began to question her sanity and then my own. The night prior I had woken up at four in the morning in a sweaty Ambien-induced fog, having just dreamt that the mouse was, in fact, my grandfather reincarnated, coming back to visit his home and lovely wife.
        But even Baba’s negotiations proved futile. At times, I was tempted to check the doors and archways for signs of Charlotte’s infamous spider webs. Surely, they had to be somewhere, spelling out “Some Mouse” or “Radiant Rodent” or “Terrific Templeton”. After all, this mouse was no ordinary creature. Her male counterparts had been eradicated on night #1 and yet, somehow, she had managed to survive in the suburbs amid a minefield of deathtraps.

          Ultimately, we brought in the d-CON. The poison was long overdue.
        “You know this will mean this mouse is going to die in your house somewhere, burrowed in some linen closet or in the hollow of one of Grandpa’s old sneakers?” I tested Baba to ensure we had her consent.

“I don’t care about the carcass. I gave her a chance. If she’s going to be here, I’d rather have her dead than alive.” She peered up at me, her chin wobbling. “I didn’t even get to make my Christmas cookies this year.”

She spoke with such muted sorrow, so little left to claim. She didn’t drive or go anywhere unless we were taking her to the doctor or dragging her on an afternoon adventure in the wheelchair. Those Christmas cookies were her tradition, her connection to her Czech homeland. She had made them every year since she was a 21-year-old war bride. 73 straight years of whipping butter, flour and sugar into submission. They made her feel useful and worthy and alive. And this year, a rodent weighing less than an ounce had stolen that away.

“Okay, we’ll put out the poison. And Baba,” I extended my hand over her own, “that mouse will die. And once she’s dead, we’ll sterilize the kitchen and make the cookies for the New Year. I promise.”

For days, the mouse ingested pellet after pellet of poison. My husband and I kept refilling it every afternoon when we came to check and saw more had been consumed.

“How is it not dead yet? This seems obscene,” I’d beseech him.

There was a small part of me that felt bad for the mouse, for the suffering that would befall her, but all I had to do was look at my Baba, wilted as a neglected houseplant, to know I would do anything to spare her more grief.

The last time the mouse visited during breakfast was three days ago. I don’t know if Baba spoke or shook her cane or even bid her farewell. I do know she swept the poop into the bin and then sprayed the counter with bleach. She reported that the turds were tinged an unnatural shade of green.

And so, six weeks into this ordeal, ‘tis the night before Christmas.

I am straining to believe in miracles, that all through her house, not a creature is stirring, especially the mouse.

A Gentle Giant

(A poem to my Dad on what would have been his 70th birthday, 9.11.19)

As youngsters,
dwarfed by your broad shoulder,
your forearm - sturdy as a maple trunk,
we swung from your limbs like monkeys,
draped off your neck like threads of tinsel,
our feet rarely grazing the ground.

We capered over you,
our personal jungle gym
because you were rooted,
solid,
staunch as a statue,
albeit one that laughed.

My own kids never knew you like that.
But, if I really try,
if I coil inward
toward the quiet tempo of my pulse,
surrender to the drumbeat in my chest,
you begin to emerge,
unfolding before me,
a warm, breathing relic from my childhood.
The awakening of a gentle giant.

The apparition is fleeting,
but just long enough so that
I may once again feel the wind on my face,
the grass nipping my ankles,
your arm as my abiding anchor.

The Bedtime Stalling Tactic I've Made Peace With

My four-year-old is using my dad’s death as a bedtime stalling tactic. It trumps ‘I’m hungry’, ‘I’m thirsty’, ‘I’m not tired’, ‘My nightlight burnt out’, ‘My pj tag is chaffing my skin’—Every. Single. Time. She’s no dummy. As soon as “I miss Grandpa” tumbles from her pouted lips, she knows I’m as smearable as butter. I’m not going to just shoo her back into her dark bedroom with a stern look and a pat on the bum.  Those three magic words are met with a sympathetic nod, a hug, a rubbing of noses, a kiss on the forehead.  Missing her dead grandfather earns her a few extra minutes of mom lingering in her room at night, smoothing the bedsheet over her limbs and scratching the crook of her elbow. Asking WHY he had to die typically reaps two bonus lullabies. They’re practically dessert.

I know she’s manipulating me, but I’m putty in my grief, stretching to her whims and words in my mindful attempt to make death something she can always ask me about, to nurture the few memories she may still have of him, to keep him vibrant in her rapidly expanding mind.

She was newly three when he died. I have perhaps two memories from when I was three, from a trip we took as a family to the Czech Republic. Both of them are flimsy and unreliable. I’m not even convinced that they are free-standing or if they instead grew out of the sepia photographs from that trip like a potato that sprouts roots.

I know my dad is slipping through time for her. It’s been a year and a half, a third of her entire life. His presence is being replaced by compound words and playground etiquette and capital and lowercase and the names of her preschool classmates. He’s irrelevant to her until the sun sets and the bedroom curtains close.

Even when my dad was here, near the end, he mostly existed in the periphery, a prop that accompanied my mom on her babysitting visits, quiet, sullen, like a raincoat you might hang up at the door.  Sure, he played restaurant with my daughter, sitting on the couch while she piled plastic food on his lap, making sure he sampled each of his dishes. Sure, he nodded off as she built castles out of Magna-Tiles on the rug around his feet and then smiled bleary-eyed when she’d shake him awake. But, he wasn’t animated, teaching her how to grip a bat in the backyard or carrying her on his back like a balding pony. He didn’t have the energy to be alive with her, to spark those moments that create memory in a toddler’s brain. By that time, he wasn’t capable of investing in his own legacy.

A few weeks ago, she began using him not only at bedtime, but when cranky or in the midst of being scolded in attempt to soften my resolve. She’ll sob and retreat, only to find me later, tears streaming down smooth cheeks, claiming to be missing him. She knows that Grandpa’s absence is an acceptable reason to cry, as opposed to being denied cookie dough Pop-tarts for dinner. She knows that I will indulge her with sympathy, her own personal get-out-of-jail-free card. In his heyday, I realize my dad may have even been proud of her for this. It’s genius.

But, her ploys were growing tiresome and overused, causing me to wonder if her constant insistence on missing him was conditioning my own mourning, dulling the significance of his loss like the boy who cried wolf. I stopped humoring melancholic Grandpa claims after she’d lose at a game of Uno or smack her sister in reproach.

“Really?’ I’d ask in a level voice, attempting to disguise my cynicism. “What is it that you miss about him, specifically?”

Typically, that would shut it down.

Until yesterday afternoon in a store, after denying her request to buy LOL charm cotton-candy scented bath fizz for $12.99 that was chocked full of parabens and chemicals and just about epitomized everything that was wrong with America, she began to cry harder as we exited through the automatic doors.

With tears splashing her pink unicorn sandals, she gulped repeatedly and peered up at me with wet eyes. “Mommy, I miss Grandpa, but mostly I’m afraid of forgetting him. What if I really do forget Grandpa?”

I stopped cold, her hand still in mine as her little body swung back to face me. It was my turn to swallow, my tears now hitting the blacktop outside the entrance to Bed, Bath, and Beyond because I didn’t know how to form the words. I didn’t know how to tell her the truth: “Sweetie, you probably will. In fact, you probably already have.”

But, I didn’t say that. Instead, I blubbered, “You won’t, honey. Don’t worry. We’ll talk about him tonight. I’ll scratch your back and we’ll remember him together.”

It’s five minutes. Two extra songs. A stall tactic for sure, but I realize it won’t last.

A man’s legacy, just might.  

I Stayed

Before we were married, I promised my then-future husband that I would stand by him in sickness, health and hair loss.

“You can count on me,” I told him earnestly while feeding each other bites of Chunky Monkey ice cream from a shared spoon in bed. (We were once adorable). “Except for two scenarios,” I qualified. “If at any point our kids get lice or our house becomes infested with bed bugs, all bets are off. I might leave the state. I cannot guarantee you that I’ll stay.” I stared at him without apology.

“Oh, come on,” he waved me off, half-chuckling.

I gripped his arm for emphasis, halting the dairy consumption. “No, really. I’m not kidding.”

You see, it’s not the bugs themselves, as long as they hunker down in their natural habitats, buzzing over daffodils and dog shit with the same uncivilized partiality. I allow them to roam free in my backyard, dodging chirpy robins and nocturnal bats. I’m even tolerant of the basement invaders, given the fact that when it comes to being underground, chances are that they were there first. To those silverfish and prehistoric centipedes, I say, if the dark corners of my storage unit are your utopia, then have at it. We’ll never be Besties and if I catch you venturing out, you’ll be subject to the “scream and squash”, but I’m not going to abandon suburbia over it.

What I can’t handle with any rational human composure are bugs in my living space, confined, cornered or contained within my toddler-hand-print-smeared walls. When they cross the threshold into my domain and venture upstairs, adhere themselves to my mattress or to my limp hair follicles, then I get crazed.

The night I found several translucent blood-sucking pediculosis capitis crawling along my three-year old’s scalp during bath time, my husband was at work. Conveniently. The same place he was the night our fire alarm started chirping at two a.m. AND the morning I broke my foot in the entryway AND the afternoon a trio of hornets took up residence in our upstairs bathroom. I don’t blame him for the timing. At least not entirely, but emergencies due tend to befall our household during his absences.

For a brief moment after I discovered the lice, I froze in my kneeled position on the floor, staring at the critters as shampoo suds dripped off my wrist, contemplating if I could abandon my two girls in four-inches of lukewarm bath water and sprint out the door until I reached Indiana. They’d eventually towel off on their own and put their pjs on, right? My six-year-old would figure it out. She knew the drill—how to set the toothbrush timer, sing “My Favorite Things” and turn on the twenty-seven nightlights that make our house shine like a beacon in the night.

But, then I beheld their naked little bodies, pink and puckered from a warm soak. My preschooler announced with glee that she had written the number “3” with a bath crayon on the side of the tub—blissful ignorance oozed from her toothy smile, naïve to the gruesome ectoparasites sucking the blood out of her head at that very moment. My emergency maternal instinct kicked in and I dialed Hair Butterflies. 

The name of the only lice-removal hair-salon in our town borders on offensive for how blatantly it attempts to evoke serenity.  No parent is calling at nine p.m. to eradicate monarchs from their offspring. Nevertheless, they offer a 24-hour answering service.

The store owner peppered me with questions, predominately about price. “Did I understand that the after-hours rate in the salon was three times the standard amount?”

“Yes, fine,” I spit out. Did he understand I was fully prepared to drain my checking account in order to eradicate the invader? This was as hostage situation and I was fully prepared to pay ransom.

An hour later, my daughters and I were doused in peppermint oil, combed out strand by strand, and probed for nits. My six-year-old and I were deemed clear, although I would spend the next seventy-two hours clawing at my scalp with the dedication only a hyena devotes to a carcass. My leprous three-year-old sat, happy as a rat at the county fair, with her iPad and a lollipop, oblivious to why her head was covered in a goop and tied down in a shower-cap. When we returned home, I sanitized the bedsheets in scalding water, vacuumed the carpets, and banished an army of stuffed animals and dolls to the freezer. Three days later, I would discover there is nothing creepier than a pair of frost-bitten plastic eyes peeking out through a Ziploc bag behind the Home Run Inn Pizza.

That incident alone should have proven my devotion. I assumed I had paid my dues, until one morning this spring I woke up scratching and discovered bites tracking down my right leg. My breath sputtered out in gasps. I resorted to birthing-class Lamaze. Could it be? NO. Not a chance. I had just returned from Europe, but I was careful. Neurotic even. Pulling back every hotel mattress pad, scouring luggage racks, and quarantining my suitcase in the downstairs laundry room to unpack. I tore apart the bed, the mattress, the box springs. I carried in extra lamps and had my girls stand on chairs with flashlights. Nothing. Not one blood smear, molted exoskeleton, or scrap of bug-sized fecal matter.

I texted my husband at work, convinced that I must have gotten the bites abroad, relieved that our house was still a safe haven, until he began to respond—unaware those reassuring little dots were foreshadowing impending doom.  

I hate to tell you this…I was going to wait until I got home, but I have them too.

I tried to unsee the words as they blurred and clouded my phone’s display, but there was no denying what this meant. The invaders were in our abode.

The kids and I ran a slew of errands to escape the contamination. When my husband came home, we attacked the master bedroom, vacuuming nightstands and ceiling fans and closet corners, bushy with dust bunnies. Sweating and spent, we sat on the striped mattress pad without a single insect in sight until my husband shot up and exclaimed, “It must be the couch!”

After a half-hour of probing through the thick folds of a twenty-year-old microfiber dinosaur, we assessed our haul: two mismatched kid socks, a filthy penny, six popcorn kernels, half of a rock-hard granola bar, a purple beaded necklace, and several plastic Shopkins, likely suffering from dust-induced asthma.

“We need to call in the dogs,” I declared. “I read about these specially trained canines that can sniff out bed bugs.”

“That’s ridiculous,” my husband countered. “How many hundreds of dollars do they want for that racket?”

“$350 and it’s worth every penny. I refuse to be that family. The outcasts, the pariahs, branded with a scarlet ‘A’. Our friends will never want to visit. Our children will be ostracized. Not to mention, I have no idea how I’m going to sleep tonight, all exposed like that goat in Jurassic Park—the one with the rope draped around its neck in the T Rex enclosure, bleating for the predator come out and rip into my succulent calf.”

My husband furrowed his brow. “Are we talking about you or the goat?”

“We’re one and the same!” I bellowed. “I warned you about this before we were married.”

“I thought you were being hyperbolic.” 

And then I exhibited one of my finer moments of adulthood and shouted back, “Do you even know me at all?!”

In the end, we got the dogs and an exterminator because again, ransom payments. Neither found any evidence of bed bugs, but the pest control inspector discovered three spider egg sacs adhered to the underbelly of our ancient couch. After vomiting in my mouth, I merrily wrote the check and exiled the sofa. Within a day, the adulterated couch was tossed and to my husband’s effusive delight, we spent Masters Tournament weekend shopping for replacement furniture.  

All in all, our marriage has withstood and prevailed. We have a new sofa that doesn’t eat people and I didn’t leave. I stayed. I haven’t fed him ice cream since before we said “I do”, but I didn’t move to Indiana. And to me, that’s pretty damn romantic.