With his permission I have reprinted his missive for your enjoyment.
"Caught a glimpse of her just twice. Gray fur flashing along a line perpendicular to my lateral peripheral vision.
What better time to consider a mouse? I say right now—(1) it's between the two St. Nicholas Days (today, and 13 days hence, 19 December); (2) it's during the commercial Christmas thing that's been cranking-up since before Black Friday; (3) and now when even the grimmest municipal offices pretend joy with cheap stock no-brand holiday hangings. It's time.
I've been imagining ONE individual celibate mouse that scurries back and forth between two houses, ours and the next-door neighbor's. Informed by me that her mouse was making uninvited visits into our house, neighbor lady asked: "What would you like me to do? Get an exterminator?" Well, no—just keep your mouse fed well enough so she'd have no need to intrude into our kitchen. Such a pain, you know, to find mouse droppings on the counter. For one thing, I grind the morning coffee there and wouldn't want to mistake a freakin' fecal part for a dark-roast coffee bean. And excrement or no, who knows where the creature's wee feet have trod before galloping along the sink-top?
You're wondering, dear Reader, why I stick with the idea of a she-mouse. Well, if this mouse is indeed celibate, that's so much easier to live with if she's a she. You just naturally feel so sorry for a male celibate, you know? Makes telling the story very very difficult. But, now, maybe it's a whole family—not always the same mouse either glimpsed in body or detected in her production. In which case, obviously, celibacy is no longer a player in the story. A tribe of incestuous mice?
My fiddle teacher lives in a much better district, stand-alone houses nowhere near any train tracks. In fact, the only public transportation he and his neighbors know is the taxi-cab. No thundering buses. And no routes nearby preferred by emergency vehicle drivers pressing their harrying horns and screaming sirens. Anyhow, there in that classy neighborhood, even a fiddle master has mice. (A mouse is no respecter of social class.) And teacher wonders how this state of affairs originated—this plague of mice—given that his block's rife with cats. The explanation was obvious to me. Every aristocrat quartered there has cats but him—so, naturally, yes, his house has become a mouse's safe haven, a place of refuge, sanctuary. No mouse in her right mind would pass up the opportunity.
We, too, here in a block of rowhouses, have no cat—not since Mamura died a year ago. Nor does our next-door neighbor. Never did. But of the 25 residential units on this street, only seven keep cats. A mouse here has rather free range to locate a home to settle in and stir things up. And our next-door neighbor's cat-free house has so much more besides to suit a mouse-ideal.
To manage this matter of the mouse not staying firm with the better choice—i.e. next door—I purchased a Have-A-Heart trap. Cost me a hefty 17 bucks! That's how much I can't bear to think of the sticky paper solution or the instant kill of the traditional original snap trap. The Have-A-Heart is excellently designed. It caters to the habit of mice to insert themselves into tight spaces almost as if they had some competitive streak—"how tight an opening can I overcome?" Once squeezed inside, a mouse finds exit impossible. Crawl-in, honey—no crawling back out.
But a householder opting for the Have-A-Heart has got to be attentive. Pick that tin box up and take it out back behind the neighbor's house, open it up and let the little critter loose into the grass. Because I am, obviously, such a softy, I've taken the box out a number of times, not sure whether I heard from within a shake or a rattle—taken it out for fear a trapped live mouse might expire horribly from hunger and thirst, stress, loneliness, major disappointment with life, loss of faith in Divine Providence. Each time I've taken it out and opened it—nothing.
The Have-A-Heart's been in place now going on three months. Without result. But very near it, once, twice a week, the mouse turds appear.
Maybe we should consider housebreaking her? Or them?
Happy Nick Day!
Yours unimproved, keeping his ear to the kitchen counter,
Matthew-Daniel, the Only Stremba in Baltimore"
You can find more from Matthew at
Storeyman Live!
Anyone who has any advice for Matthew on
catching his elusive mouse (or mice) please let us all know in the comment section. bill
ps: This photo is of a mouse that patti and I captured one night with our homemade triggered gravity trap. The table the trap was set on is glass so I could take poor mousey's picture looking up from below.
We released her away from the farm house.
