Mice….

So cute and tiny, their perky little ears and little buggy black eyes, inquisitive and friendly along with their twitchy little whiskers, they are ripe with cuteness… yet so potent with potential for craziness.   One never knows what a frightened mouse will do.  Will it try to sit on your lap, will it run over your toes, will it drop on your head in the middle of the night, jump in your hair?  You just can’t imagine the draconian torture practices that someone could employ using a mouse…EEK.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not particularly afraid of mice, but I would suggest that there is something built into the DNA of some of us that makes us a little jumpy around loose mice.  Like levitate on to a table jumpy.  Have you seen how fast they can scurry around when a light shines on them in the middle of the night?  Let me tell you, I have…imagine those wind-up toy mice that will run in figure eight like circles…yeah and speed that up to about 50 miles per hour.  THAT is exactly what they do!  Terrifying.

I don’t know what it is about them that makes me want to jump on a chair. It is a ridiculous reaction.  They are 1000 times smaller than me and have tiny little teeth and as mentioned above, so cute…what possible harm could they bring to me?

Well, Bubonic plague and Hantavirus to name 2 of the 35 diseases that rodents carry.  Ticks and fleas feed on mouse blood and then move to live on other animals, like deer.  Deer wander through yards and BOOM! some of these diseases spread to us.  Ick!!!  They are not tiny little cute things that a major cartoon character was designed after…they are scurrying nightmares on 4 legs.  The entertainment industry has hypnotized us with the images of dancing rodents into believing that they are benign and friendly.  Several nights ago, one tried to bite me on the toe!

Many of you know that I espouse to being a Taoist and sort of Buddhist.  I claim to be a pacifist, but I have written a short story called “Bug Wars”.  Clearly, there is some disconnect, you think, between me and my ethical beliefs.  Absolutely.  When this tiny little mouse creature came to live in the minibus I’m living in right now, I thought let’s convince it to go outside again.  I pick up and remove stink bugs from my bus without killing them.  I’m trying to live peacefully and in concert with my environment.  In the beginning, about mid-March, I thought, it’s only here because its cold.  My friends at the hostel snickered.  I said, I don’t want to kill it, let’s just live trap it and put it far away from my bus in the woods.  Ok, stop laughing.  Yes, I live in the middle of the woods with creatures who’s home it really is, I should expect an invasion, I suppose.

I admit, I did put out a live trap at first…its presence there seemed to convince the mouse to go away and it seemed to…until 3 days ago.  That is when the mouse invasion suddenly occurred.  It was a planned attack, the minibus and the backroom storage area with the food and paper supplies across the campus from me.   They were the advance edges of the 3 AM raid.  It was a two-pronged attack!  Since then, I’ve been in a battle for the bus.  First, I suggested they leave, then I tried swatting them with my electric bug zapper…man are they fast.  Then yesterday after the toe incident the night before I went full on war.  Yup, I went to the hardware and bought those old-fashioned traps.  The ones that ‘SNAP!” loudly when they catch something and you jump. Yup those traps.

I came back and tried to bait one.  ‘SNAP!’  First try, I caught the side of one finger and a giant blood blister arose quit quickly.  A tear came to my eye.  Clearly, I am not a killer, the universe is telling me.  But I cannot have plague filled wind-up toys terrorizing me every time I sit down.  So, again, I tried.  This time I couldn’t figure out how the metal stick thingy fit into the hole to get it into killing mode.  Off I go to find a male…surely, they know how to do this. Well, they did but not without telling me that indeed I had purchased some crazy medieval torture device that was way behind the times.  Damn, I thought, no one tells me these things.  He showed me how to do it and I went back to the bus and successfully baited 2 of them.  Then I left.

When I came back after dinner nothing had changed…no mice.  Phew.  Later in the evening there was a loud noise that surprised me, and I thought someone had thrown a stone at the bus windshield.  Goodness, I’d caught a mouse. Now I had to deal with it.  See that is the part I hate…death.  If they could just understand, I’ve tried talking to them and being reasonable, that this was my home, …and stay out, this would have never devolved into this mayhem of war and death.

Somehow, I think that is a profound statement.  If we could all just listen, accept and honor each other, life would not devolve into war and mayhem.  Maybe we should work on that. 

No, I am not going to allow the mice to take over my living space…as I write this there are 2 baited traps under and next to the seat I am sitting on.  The war rages on.  I am hoping for a truce.  I did get the big one last night. The babies remain loose.  They managed to eat all the peanut butter off the paddle without triggering the trap.  I’ve been told that their headquarters is likely to be in a bin above my seat which will require opening…someone please come help me. I do NOT want to open that bin alone.  Clearly, I am not good at death and destruction and taking a life.  It hurts me because I know that the mouse is made of the same stuff I am….

Please send me love as I wrestle with the realities of living in a world where sometimes we cannot communicate our truest feelings or intents in a way that is peaceful or affects behavior.  Much love to all.