Last week I received an email from one of my neighbours, with the subject line “mouse”.
Living up in the Great White North, fronting on a lake with treed/bush areas in behind makes for oodles of ‘wild’ critters roaming the area. Deer, raccoons, skunks, mink, muskrats, beavers, red squirrels, chipmunks and…… mice.
They are quite numerous, but we just sort of live with them…outside that is. But sometimes, one manages to find the front door of a house and marches inside like an uninvited relative showing up for dinner.
In this case, it was breakfast. At 7 in the morning, my smartphone ‘boodle-oops’ a tone (best way to describe the sound) signaling an incoming email, the email with the ‘mouse’ subject line.
So I open the email, and grinned. The neighbour asks if I ‘wouldn’t mind coming over to get rid of a mouse caught in a trap’. Since her husband is away and he normally does the dirty work of removing any that get caught, she resorted to asking me to come over and remove it for her.
Now my neighbour is far from being the frilly, squeely-girl type and is actually quite the outdoorswoman who fishes, cleans/guts her own catch, has 4 children and is therefore used to all kinds of gross things coming out of their orifices, will tackle any job involving a circular saw, chainsaw or an axe, plays women’s league hockey and is generally game for anything….except removing a mouse from a trap.
She hates them, actually is quite petrified of them. Mice turn her into said frilly squeely-girl. Me on the other hand, I don’t have a problem with mice…spiders, yes…I have a huge problem with spiders….but mice, no.
So I grabbed my mug of freshly brewed tea, threw my pullover on, stepped into my flip flops and headed over….still in my jammies.
I walk in the door and she is sheepishly standing there, thanking me profusely for coming to her rescue. I pulled some rubber gloves out of my pocket that I grabbed on my way out the door and picked up the trap, with the teeny little mouse held fast by the snapping mechanism. His little head pinched in a death grip.
Poor little bugger. She hands me a small plastic bag and I pry the snap bar off its head and drop it into the bag, then head outside to dispose of him in the garbage.
I come back in and see the relief on her face. I sat down at the table to finish my tea and ask her, ‘so what are you going to do when I go back south on Monday?’
‘You can’t go home’ she says…
Hmmmm…. Wonder if hubby will believe that excuse?
