Blood on my hands

It's almost becoming like a joke – every day I wonder if this string of bizarre and/or unsettling events is finally over, and every day, it turns out that it is not.

Today I didn't have long to wait. I woke up groggy and discombobulated, went to the kitchen for a drink of water, and as I was drinking it walked over to check the mouse trap I set between the refrigerator and the wall last night. There, upside down under a snapped trap and spreadeagle in a pool of gore, was a little feller who looked an awful lot like this one here, only with the top of his skull sprung open and, you know, dead.

Every year at this time I go through a few weeks of trapping and killing the latest round of fresh new mice. I already wrote about the flaxseed-bear-eating mouse. Since then there's also been the one that ran across the kitchen floor four times in ten minutes while I sat at the table reading, and the one who over the course of an evening made off (one at a time, no doubt) with almost half a bag of beans, and the one that was hiding motionless behind a loaf of bread while I (unaware) made a sandwich, until he just couldn't stand it anymore and made a break for it – zipping across the counter and diving into the space under a burner on the stove ...

In other words, they're out of control! So far, in the last four days, I've killed three of them. I hate to do it – they're so cute, and I really do believe they have a right to live – ahimsa &c. – but there are just SO many of them, and they're so destructive and pestilence-ridden ... And yeah, it's just stuff – what does it really matter, in the cosmic scheme of things, if they chew into a brand new unopened box of cereal, or eat the rickrack off the clothespin bag my great grandmother made in the 50s.

But they also have a taste for the wires in the wall, which has caused me not just a little worry of late, especially last night, when our power went out for a few minutes, and then came back on, flickering, and I looked (on a hunch) into the space behind the kitchen cabinets where they were chewing wires last year and found that they have been at it again. Reverence for life is a value I care about, and I include my own life on the list of lives worth revering! I don't want to die in a raging inferno.

The so-called "humane" catch-and-release traps don't really solve the problem, by the way. The mice just turn around and walk right back into the house. Or if not, other mice do.

So anyway. I dropped the unhappy little corpse into the garbage, unrolled two whole squares of paper towel – the thick, expensive kind – wadded them up (to provide the maximum buffer possible between my hand and the carnage), and started mopping. And maybe this is just too much information, but the blood – for such a small animal, this one sure seemed to have produced a lot of it. The more I mopped, the more it all just seemed to spread itself around ... a gruesome and grisly start to what I hope will yet turn out to be a lovely spring day.

Small creatures

First of all, thank you to everyone who emailed me to express concern over my last, quite dramatic post. Just when I think that nobody's reading this thing anymore, I suddenly find out that a lot of people still are – and they are (you are) lovely, wonderful, caring people.

I'm okay. The thing that happened wasn't really such a huge shock or revelation, but more just an unwelcome deepening of my understanding of a situation I already knew about ... And if that's too obscure an explanation, I'll just say that I've been reminded of how important it is to me to try to stay present and aware in my own life, and that that is really the most important thing that happened. And it's not a bad thing.

Moving on: Last winter, in an attempt to keep ourselves warm at night, Mr. A and I bought a few of these furry bears that are stuffed with flax seeds, which you heat up in the microwave and snuggle up with in bed. They worked great, but over time their fur went kind of flat and they started exuding a strange (flax-like?) smell whenever we heated them, so we stopped using them. They were still cute, though, so we kept them around thinking we might give them away next time someone with a kid came to visit.

Then this morning I noticed the mice had gotten to them. They'd chewed little holes right through the fur and extracted a cup or more of seeds, which they'd hulled and eaten, leaving a huge and surprisingly neat pile of feathery chaff on top of the Yoga Journal on which the bear was sitting. So I'm back to killing mice again. Sad day. They're so cute, but so destructive. Not only of stuffed bears, but also linens, furniture, walls ... not to mention, they pee constantly wherever they go. Filthy creatures!

Also, on my way to work I accidentally killed a dove with the car. It was standing on the road with a bunch of its friends, who all flew off as the car approached. But this one last dove just kept standing there and standing there, and I kept thinking, "He's going to take off any second! They always do!" And then, he didn't. I hit the brake at the last possible moment, but it was too late. I heard a thump on the bottom of the car, and when I looked in the rear view mirror there was a big pouffy cloud of fine brown feathers trailing out from behind the car. And the poor little brown body, lying on the asphalt. Sigh. He will make a nice breakfast for some larger bird today, I imagine. And maybe there was something wrong with him already – why else didn't he fly away with his buddies?

Finally, I will report that I'm very glad the low-rise jeans thing is coming to a close soon. Yesterday at lunch I saw a supremely curvalicious young woman sitting at a cafe table, with a full three inches of crack exposed at the back of her jeans. No doubt she looked fabulous in them standing up. But man. The crack action was something I just really did not need to see.