From the Book of Alchemy post: write a story about my experience with vermin.

When behind glass, mice are adorable. Oh, those teeny little triangular faces. The velvet peach ears. Black bead eyes and the squiggly nose with whiskers all atremble. Just friggin’ cute.

Mice in my house. Not so much. Like when I first moved into my 120 year old house. And I was laying in my bedroom and was slowly awakening on a bright summer morning. Life is good. Sunlight is sieving through the lace curtains. The hardwood floor shines with an inner amber. And then came the non-stop sound of scratching. Gnawing. A heart-churning scritching behind the walls. Inside the walls. Of my 120 year old house that I had just purchased and moved into.

When your house abutts a field, mice will happen. But hearing them inside the walls of my second story bedroom and everything was actually halfway tidy made my heart hammer. Oh God. What if the house collapses? Yes. That was my worry. That mice would eat through the walls and the struts and the supporting beams and whittle away the foundation and the house would sag and then list and then collapse and I would still be in bed watching the sun sieve through the curtains.

About once a year, a mouse will scurry through the house. We have, what I think was, a former root cellar under the house. Defniitely not a finished basement. Just a space that a person can barely lie under and shimmy from one hideously cramped corner to the next. My claustrophobia is currently making my chest ache so give me a second to think wide open spaced thoughts. Meadows. Mountains. The ocean. The beach. An empty amphitheater.

Okay. So mice will get under the house becuase there is nothing quite so insecure as the foundation of a 120 year old house. And there are holes in the floor the size of radiator pipes (I wonder how the house was heated?) and the radiators are no longer there but the holes are wide enough and deep enough into the root cellar of death that the mice will find their way up. And even though I have two big dogs, the mice will just scamper around like little fuzzy dumplings on their splintery fine feet with long fingery claws that are just to cute if they weren’t attatched to mice who immediately bring up the idea of the plague. And these little potsticker dumpling mice will scurry into my living room. While the dogs and the humans are in there snoozing or watching television or having their attention jerked to the itty bitty mobile appetizer that has suicidal tendencies.

The dogs will stare at it. And I will not jump up in my chair and shriek. I will not run for a broom. No. I will calmly open the jar of peanut butter and feed a bead of it onto a trap and set it right behind the basket of blankets that is right across from the hole and the following morning I will take the little crescent roll shaped stiff mouse to the trash can. Yes. I know that sounds awful. But if the mice were nice enough not to migrate from my living room to my kitchen and scurry over the counters leaving behind their seed shaped poop everywhere then maybe we could have a conversation about cohabitation. But they don’t pay rent and they’ll eat the bread that I store on top of the refrigerator without asking. And I have a problem with that.

When my children were young, my parents bought us season passes to the local zoo. Every Saturday, we’d head over to the zoo and move from enclosure to enclosure. And when you’ve been to the zoo every week for months on end, you get used to seeing the same animals all the time. So you start looking for something new to entertain yourself. Like the rats stealing the duck food. In the avian enclosure, stainless steel bowls brimming with duck feed were always set out right before the zoo opened. And under the thickets of decorative grasses were rat holes. I know this because the rats would sprint to the duck food bowls and eat. And eat. And eat with no concern for the thriving humanity staring at them. Cheeky beggars.

So I invented the game called “Scare the Rat” which isn’t awful. The kids and I would just bark at the rats. And they’d jump, zip around, and sprint back to their holes. And moments later, the cheeky guys would poke their triangular heads out and we’d bark and they’d disappear. Or they’d peek their heads out and not see us or hear us or smell us and would scamper back to the bowls and then “BARK!” and run back they did.

I accept your judgement. I was not kind to the rats that were only eating a free meal. I should be more compassionate to the rats. I will have to go to the zoo and offer apologies to their offspring twenty years removed.

But I have a healthy respectful fear of rats. Because I also remember the time when my mother-in-law, daughter, and I were in Central Park just as the sun was setting. We were sitting on a bench and about twenty feet from us, as the shadows under a tree lengthened, the ground looked like it was boiling.

Rats. Dozens of rats were running out of their holes under the tree and dashing out toward the street.

We left immediately and walked as fast as possible back to our Air BnB.