I have finally recovered enough to tell the story. It’s a short story, really, but one that has changed my life.

Four weeks ago tonight, Daniel and I had just finished watching a riveting episode of Mad Men when I got up to start my bathroom routine. I walked in to the bathroom, flipped the light on, pulled the pocket door shut, and that’s when a small but quick movement caught my eye.

In the corner of the bathroom about 2 feet from me was a large mouse scuttling along the wall until it squeezed through the space between the door and the wall. I screamed, jumped up on the side of the bathtub, and completely freaked out. My skin was crawling, I could feel tiny mouse toes on my bare feet, and I just felt invaded and overrun. I didn’t see where it ran so I could just see it crawling all over my sleeping Addie. Crying, wailing, convulsing, demands that we move back to Oklahoma immediately…

There have been various mouse incidences in my parents’ houses over the years: once in high school, I saw a mouse run out of my bathroom under my bed. And another time I saw one climb out of the cabinet under the oven and run into the living room. At breakfast one day, I grabbed a box of cereal from the pantry and saw that a hole had been chewed through the top of the box. My parents used to pay my brother $1 per mouse he caught, so he set up traps in the garden and caught dozens. Ok, maybe a dozen. All these “encounters” with the rodent world completely grossed me out, but I wasn’t so completely spooked like I was this time, I guess because none of these had happened in MY home.

I asked Daniel what he thought had happened when I screamed, if he was concerned for safety, if his first thought was that there was a human intruder in our home? He said, “Oh no, I knew you saw a mouse.”

Well, we set up sticky traps that the doorman had on hand, and went to bed. With all the lights on. Neither of us slept at all that night: every time I closed my eyes I had  a dream about mice crawling all over me, and Daniel was plagued by the thought of having to deal with a live mouse stuck to a glue board.We struggled through a leadership seminar at church the next day, and purchased a fancy, battery-powered electrocution trap on the way home, but never caught it.

So we had the handyman and the exterminator out to plug and fill various holes around our plumbing and radiators. And we choose to believe that particularly mouse was just lost, found his way back out, and is gone for good. But…I still have dreams that it lives between the bedsheets.

 

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