It’s been sort of a strange month around here. Our babysitter Zimbabwean Sheila had to move to Canada abruptly for immigration reasons in early feb. This left me with no writing time (errand time, mental health time) whatsoever and it’s taken a full month to find a replacement. I had no idea how very much my 8 hours a week mean to me! How I rely on them! Now the new babysitter, cheerful and sweet violist Bonnie, is established and all is well again. Well, she started on Tuesday. She was supposed to come today but I had to cancel her because Isaac is sick with the flu, has a fever, and is in ultra-cling mode. I’m only getting a moment now because he’s conked out on the couch, cheeks asmoulder.
Meanwhile, after the great squirrel siege of 1999-2001, our varmint problem is back. A few months ago—after a five-year lull!—the squirrels moved back in uninvited to our upstairs bathroom wall. I called Critter Control immediately (we got to know each other well during those dark times) and they came out and expertly trapped the varmints, taking them, I’m told, to a nice country home. However, the squirrel-catching professional had a bad report about our gutters and fascia (the wood behind the gutters). He said, “Whoever fixed those for you didn’t do you any favors. There are holes all along this side of the house, and it’s just a welcome mat. You have to get those fixed or I will be back.”
I listened to him, but then I didn’t really take action. The squirrels were gone and all was silent in that intra-wall space. I went on with my busy life and forgot about it. UNTIL one evening when I was sitting here and there was the most uncanny little sound in the office wall. A scuffle? A squeak? I chalked it up to the wind and forgot about it again, until one afternoon when it really sounded for all the world like something fell down the chimney. Oh well, whatever. But over a short time the persistent scuffling and squeaking here and there in the house seemed to get more and more noticeable and less and less easily dismissed as audio hallucinations. One morning I was drinking my tea and Lena dog sat staring fixedly at a blank area of the dining room wall, hackles up, slight growl on her lips. For at least a half-hour. I listened, I checked up and down, in and out, but I couldn’t see anything and figured she was just making a big deal about nothing.
Denial? You could say so.
So then the other night the squeaking SQUEAKING business was just totally impossible to ignore. I started to fixate on the idea that the house, walls and chimney especially, had become a major bat colony. Now, I should add that bats creep me out way more than squirrels and once I had this idea in my head it was impossible not to take action. I called Critter Control again and shortly the man was on my porch again. “Hello, again,” he said sardonically.
“Hello,” I said sheepishly.
I showed him around the areas where I’d heard things and described what I’d heard. He explored the attic and the basement fully and then rendered his verdict. “It’s not bats. It’s mice.”
This reminded me that a couple weeks ago when I was in a flurry to leave for Pittsburgh (too bad I didn’t have time to write about the weekend Isaac and I spent in vacationland Pittsburgh, giving Ben the weekend off while we had a big adventure, it was pretty fun) Isaac suddenly wanted to fill the birdfeeder. Right as we were packing up the car. So, okay, it would only take a second, so I opened up the tool shed and found that our bag of birdseed had been completely ransacked by… mice? Perhaps? Totally ripped open and most of the sunflower seeds devoured. Groan. Anyway, I rushed off to Pittsburgh, had a busy weekend, came home to houseguests, then a sick husband, then a sick child and no babysitter all the while and then just run-run-run all the time. I forgot about the birdseed! Of course!
So I mentioned this and the man went and looked around outside and at the birdseed mess. He said, “You’re offering them food. You’re offering them warmth. Your foundation is full of easy holes for them to get in. In fact I’m surprised you haven’t had a skunk up in here.”
I said, “Skunk!?”
He said, “They eat mice. This hole [indicating a chunk of missing concrete at the soil line about an inch tall by six inches long] is certainly big enough for a skunk. And these are skunk tracks right here in the snow.”
I said, “Are you sure they aren’t cat tracks? We have a lot of cats around here.”
He laughed and said, “No.”
So reluctantly I agreed to let him lay poison all over the place where these critters frequent in our basement and attic. I pointed out my fears about the poison: that my cat would eat a poisoned mouse and get sick (he said she’d have to eat ten of them), and that they would then crawl up in the wall and die there and stench up the whole place (he said mice have too little moisture to stench much, not sure I buy that).
So a few hours after he left Isaac and I were hanging around the house. He was upstairs and I was tidying up the kitchen. Then I heard the loudest squeaking—beyond anything a natural creature could possibly make. I called up the stairs, “Isaac, are you playing with a squeaky toy?” He called back down, “No.” I said, “Is Lena playing with a squeaky toy up there?” He said, “No, she’s sitting right here and not playing with anything. She’s asleep.”
The squeaking was emanating from the dining room wall, piercingly loud, desperate and hysterical. Then the chewing started in. My neck hair began to rise. I scampered upstairs to cower on the couch with Isaac. In a few moments we heard the critter, huge, furry, fur audibly rushing against the other side of the painfully thin drywall, as he made his way across a duct and then up into the floor space of the room where we sat. We could hear its movements exactly. He walked the perimeter. I can tell you it was no mouse.
I said, “Let’s get out of here.”
Isaac was right with me, suddenly more cooperative about getting his shoes on than ever before. We fled and spent the rest of the afternoon at the Science Center, having fun but also killing time until Ben came home from work. He walked through he house before us and there was nothing there. I hoped that the whole thing had blown over, and that whatever it was had gone away. But then the pets began a vigil. They took turns staring at a certain heating vent in that room. Occasionally I would hear a rustle, but mostly it was just things that they could hear. The vigil went on for three days or so, and then ended.
Now I’m convinced that what happened was that a big huge RAT took some chomps of the mouse poison. Freaked out, squealing its head off, climbed up the dining room wall, over the top, and up into the TV room, where it struggled for three days (during the vigil) and then finally died. So, yes, I think there’s an enormous dead rat in the floor. But I can’t prove it. Having the Critter Control guy come and look for a dead rat that might not even be there (maybe he did leave?) is expensive and perhaps futile. But if or when I smell the slightest whiff, the slightest suggestion of a hint of eau de dead rat I will be on the phone requesting immediate attention!
Meanwhile I’ve been trying to scare up bids and get someone here to fix this house. I mean FIX the Swiss cheese style fascia, which means taking off the gutters, which need to be replaced anyway. And I mean someone going over this foundation with a fine toothed comb and filling every hole possible with concrete. The Critter Control man says we need to fill every hole around the outside of the house that’s bigger than a ball-point pen and lower than eye level. (Did I mention that this is a 120-year-old house?)
I’ve been quite jumpy. I’ve been leaving lights on at night. And when I have to approach a dark room, I turn on the light by reaching into the room, and then I wait a few moments in case I startle something. (I haven’t.) I’ve been checking my shoes before I put them on. Lena has been patrolling at night, god bless her. Occasionally I hear her down there, seemingly chasing something, but I can assure you that I do not make a practice of going down to see. If I find something dead in the morning (and I haven’t) okay. But I don’t want to know what she does with her free time, I really don’t!
Isaac said, “How do you cook a mouse?”
I said, “Well, we don’t cook mice, because we don’t eat mice.”
He said, “I know how you cook them.”
“Um, how?”
“First: you take off the fur. Then you boil it and eat it!”
[Repressing the visual images that this conjures] “Hm. I suppose that would work, but we really don’t eat mice.”
“Why we don’t eat mice?”
Oh—god—I’ve had enough trouble explaining why we DO eat cows/chickens/turkeys/fish/pigs lately. It just all makes me wish I could just say that we’re herbivores like triceratops. Why did I ever stop being a vegetarian back in the 90s?
On another note, Isaac said recently, “I want to be a firefighter.”
“That’s great,” I said.
He paused and then added an important detail: “A LADY firefighter.”
Gulp.
With inward apologies to the transgendered community, I explained, “Well, you can’t be a LADY firefighter, because when you grow up you will be a man, and so you will never BE a lady, and so you will just have to be a fireman instead.”
“Okay,” he said with a shrug.
I guess the good news is that a few generations of feminism have been successful in breaking down those gender-based career roles. It’s like recently I got “Free to Be You and Me” out of the library because I used to love it so. But I turned it off shortly because what I realized right away was that it was no longer debunking these gender rules (like the teasing kids in “William Wants a Doll”) but for Isaac INTRODUCING the concepts in the first place. I guess that’s good. There’s been progress.
But still, if I see a rodent of any kind—I mean even just a tiny mouse or a harmless vole—you can expect me to shriek and leap directly up onto the nearest chair. It must be some kind of reflex.