The Imperfect Imbalanced of Nature

Our house is infested with mice and the irony is not lost on me. The first bit of irony is that we were not that sad that our three cats separately wandered from the security of our yard and have, one by one, chosen not to return. Ryan and I both feel bad about how much we don’t feel bad.

In many ways it was the right time to part ways with those three cats who had, of late, taken to urinating behind the couch in my daughter’s room when they weren’t interested in journeying all the way to the basement; and behind the bar in the basement even though that is quite close to their litter box: a feline middle finger to us more than any sort of reflection on their physical limitations. When we discovered that half of Twila’s toys were soaked in cat pee a week or so after the final cat took a camping trip and didn’t return, Ryan and I both thought, good riddance.

But now there are multiple mice living in our basement, coming up to the main floor when we sleep and occasionally when we are quietly watching TV at night. They scuttle around the counters, eat up the little crumbs and scraps that our daughters are wont to leave on every surface, and—most frustratingly—poop in little clusters in the corners of the floor, the counter, and the coffee tables.

The poop upstairs is minimal compared with the poop that was coating the shelving in the basement where many carefully wrapped trinkets and long-forgotten knick-knacks were shredded by these new little invaders to make suitable living quarters, I can only imagine.

It was finding tiny clusters of mouse poop on our family-room coffee table that was the final straw for me. Having a nine-month old baby who relishes picking up the tiniest over-looked scraps of plastic, paper or wine foil, and stowing them speedily in her mouth, I began wildly cleaning and disinfecting every surface she could reach. On the third morning of this predawn cleaning frenzy, Ryan announced that he was going to get traps. “Live traps?” I hoped aloud.

“We can try that,” he answered.

After two days, we had not managed to entice a single rodent into the cold, metal box even though it contained a large dollop of peanut butter. Late one evening as we sat watching TV, we heard a familiar scuttling around in the kitchen. We got up fast enough to catch a glimpse of one tiny invader running across the top of the trap. Ryan strode from the room and retrieved the old-fashion mouse guillotines he had purchased a few days earlier.

As he set three neck-snapping mouse traps in the basement, I sat on the couch, my head in my hands pondering how ironic this was. What kind of karmic lesson was I being taught? Not two months ago I was getting up in the middle of the night to bottle feed an infant mouse. My daughter and I were hoping against hope that he might live long enough to open his eyes. He played in our hands and slept in warm blankets under a heat lamp. Now, weeks later, I am an accessory to killing his full-grown counterparts.

“Moses wasn’t running all over the house, pooping on the counters,” Ryan reminded me gently.

“I know,” I said, “it just seems so absurd, now, that I was working so hard to keep him alive.”

“It was absurd,” Ryan agreed, “but that’s what made it so beautiful.”

I know there is a difference between these mice, overrunning our home and keeping a pet mouse—raised and tame— in a cage and away from a baby’s hands and mouth. For our baby’s sake we had to get rid of them, I thought as I heard a loud SNAP under the floor.

Life is strange. It’s odd how we organize things; what we deem acceptable and unacceptable. After my walk home from Twila’s preschool in my nursing bra the other day, I spent a lot of time thinking about how strange it is that men of all ages can run around with their shirts off while women have to wear two layers of fabric over their chests to be appropriate. Why do we keep ferrets inside our house but lock our trash cans against raccoons? Why do we put food out for birds but go to great lengths to keep squirrels from eating the seed? Why do some people live to be a hundred, and others die at twenty five? Why are some people able to birth ten children, while others struggle to get pregnant even once? Fitness and health seem to have very little to do with it, making survival of the fittest an imperfect description of what we actually see in nature.

There is a strange imbalance in nature. This is a notion that occurred to me for maybe the first time when I was pregnant at eighteen. I had stumbled on pregnancy the way some people stumble onto a good restaurant. I was just going along and suddenly, there it was before me. I knew little about fertility or prenatal health. Pregnancy was something I was working to get past. It was utterly foreign to me that some people were, even as I put on a bulky coat to hide my growing belly from my high school classmates, working very hard to achieve what I had mistakenly attained.

As the weekend wrapped up, Twila and Ryan and Jada and I all roamed around the yard, picking up leaves and sweeping the driveway. Ryan and Twila went inside to get a pair of work gloves. Moments later Twila came bounding out of the kitchen door, the metal live-trap held high in the air.

“Mom!” she yelled, “we caught a mouse!”

We spent the next hour watching our captured mouse eat peanut butter through a small, Plexiglas observation window. Twila talked to him and attempted to stuff a few shreds of grass in through the one-way opening.

As the sun sank low, more quickly than it did during the summer, we carried the live trap out to the far end of the yard and let the little mouse go under our lilac bush. Twila had a hard time saying goodbye, as she does, but we talked about the fairy that went marketing, enjoying all the things and creatures she found for a while and then letting them go, and how we can’t keep creatures just because we love them. She was sort of okay with it, and it was almost like the lessons we’ve been teaching over and over are starting to get through.

We walked back to the house at the end of a beautiful day, content that we were doing our best: subduing the wilderness around our house as gently as possible; content that even in the absurd imbalance of nature, sometimes beauty is found in the midst of the struggle.