We live in the country. A couple miles outside the town center of Hutchinson, KS. Pretty much the middle of nowhere. But the kind of place where we wave at the neighbors from our cars…or from the mower when we’re out cutting our 14 acres and they’re working their 20. You know, well outside the bounds of suburbia.

There are some amazing things about living like this. For one, we wave at those neighbors, but we pretty much can’t hear them. We can barely see them at their house. It’s not that I’m not a people-person, but having lived in apartments and traditional neighborhoods, I’d rather have my neighbors at a distance. Maybe it’s just me, but that’s how I like it.

We have lots of room outside around the house. It means yardwork, but it also means that if we want to go out and throw a ball, play some soccer, shoot airsoft guns, or fly a kite…our total commute is walking out the front door. Heck, if I want to take a quick 1/2 mile walk, all I have to do is go down the driveway to get the mail.

While not much bothers me about living out here, there is one thing. Well, many things, but we usually only have to deal with one at a time. You see, no matter the number of cats we have (two) or the number of snakes that we carefully try not to kill, we have field mice visit the house every once in a while.

When the weather makes a sudden turn we get shocked by one or two every year. A couple weeks ago, my wife walked into the bedroom after showering and calmly told me (while still laying snuggled under my blankets) that she’d seen a mouse run out of her closet. I asked her where it went and she said either the main part of the bathroom (which connects to our bedroom) or into my closet.

I sat very calmly in bed. I tried to strategize. I tried to figure out if I had any shoes outside my closet (as Hectic Dad I usually have shoes scattered all over the place. But as OCD Dad I try to transport them to my closet regularly. The struggle is real!). I tried to figure out if I maybe had clothes in the laundry room I could wear. I pretty much tried to figure out if I could just avoid my closet and the bathroom for the better part of a week.

You see, I’m not really big on rodents. Rodents of any kind. Heck, I don’t even like squirrels despite their amazing marketing with the cute tails and the adorable bury-an-acorn-grow-a-tree thing. They’re just rats with a better PR agency.

That part of 1984 where Winston is being threatened by the rat. That gave me nightmares for weeks. Every time it comes up, I get shivers down my spine. The move Ben. I almost died when it came on TV and my sister wouldn’t turn it off. I still hold it against her…and that happened in 1977 or so!

Like I said, rodents are not my thing.

Later that day I had dutifully buried my rodent-terror and distributed sticky traps (with a dab of peanut butter for added effect) throughout all the potential running zones. I had cleaned up a bunch of piles of stuff that had accumulated in my closet, bedroom, and various other places throughout the house. I had created the todo list for the kids to do the same, and had practiced my required nagging in the mirror to get the tone and facial expression just right without letting the rodent-terror show through.

I was actually pretty proud of myself that I’d set the traps out.

Working from home also has amazing benefits, but sharing my home and workspace with a mouse is not one of them. I was pretty much on edge every day. It doesn’t help that I have great peripheral vision, but also wear glasses. I saw so many things moving out of the corner of my eye that it was nutty. What was nuttier was how quickly my achy knees could bring my feet up onto my chair. Not to mention how quickly I hopped up onto the counter on one occasion. Don’t judge…it’s a lifestyle choice: Mouse hatred/fear.

By dinnertime, my blood pressure had decreased a bit and my level of awareness of sudden movements was a bit dulled. Dare I say that I’d actually relaxed a bit. Not to worry, that wouldn’t last long.

We ate and were in the process of clearing the table. I stepped into the pantry to put something away and all of the sudden my wife shouted “There he goes”. Chairs went flying. Yelling. Scrambling. I literally almost climbed the shelves. A few hectic moments later she identified his path as from the eating area to under the roll-through cabinet that we have. The cabinet opens on the dishwasher side so we could load plates onto a cart, and then opens on the eating side so we could unload the plates to the table. Of course, when we built it we didn’t realize that we wouldn’t be able to find a cart that would fit under the counter. So pretty much this really cool idea has turned into a space to collect odd stuff. You know, extra parts for the bar stools. A small cooler. Water jugs. Things that don’t fit in the cabinets in general.

And now a mouse.

Or not…because the danged thing may have run straight through. Nobody new. And my blood pressure and angst went through the roof.

My younger son and I went and retrieved half of the sticky traps from our bedroom/bathroom/closets. Not to worry though, that meant we brought eight traps into the kitchen. And we left eight. It’s not like I don’t do things big!

So we distributed the traps. I didn’t sleep really well that night (visions of the three-headed mouse from the Nutcracker danced through my head). When morning arrived I felt a bit like my house was shrinking. I might have two mice in my house, and since they were in disparate parts of the house I was now relegated to racing from room to room, always with a mind for what furniture I could jump on. Then it hit me that several years ago we had two mice that moved into one of our couches. Now nothing felt safe! I was this close to carrying a wooden stool around with me the whole day so I would have something safe to jump on.

But again, not to worry. Two days later my level of angst had dropped. I was actually able to go into my closet without too much fear. I could cook in the kitchen and not constantly shift from one foot to the other, worried that “Mr Mousey” (as he’d been dubbed) might run over my foot.

I actually got a good nights sleep. At 5:55am I went upstairs to wake the kids for school. As I was headed down the stairs there was a commotion and an “Oh crap!” from my youngest son. He ran across the hall to his room and launched himself onto his loft bed.

I stood on the stairs, frozen by the desire to run while knowing that I had to be the good Dad and find out what was wrong. Before he even said it, I knew…”there was a mouse in the bathroom”. I asked “where did he go”, and got that look of you really think I bothered to watch, I’m your son, I was running for my life. No words needed to be exchanged.

I warned my daughter (whose sink area and bedroom adjoin the bathroom on the other side (think the Brady Bunch kids bathroom, just in an “L”), and went downstairs to dress (actually to cower on my bed, but I’m not telling the kids that!).

After dropping off at school I picked up more sticky traps. I should have bought stock in the company. Or maybe just gone direct to the warehouse. Like I said, I do things big! I even got mouse poison. The kind with the green pellets. Kill ’em dead and let ’em rot. If they had a salesperson who had asked I would have bought anything they recommended. If mouse guillotines had been available and somebody told me they worked…sold!

So I dutifully distributed the sticky traps (with peanut butter dabbed on the middle, of course) and then allocated the mouse poison to all over the house. Upstairs, downstairs, and main floor all received their fair share.

For all you animal lovers out there, don’t worry. No mice have been harmed. Nothing on the traps. I just went and checked every mouse poison location (at least I think I checked them all) and no poison has been disturbed. The kids have gotten comfortable throwing their clothes and school stuff on the floor in piles everywhere in the house again. Things are back to normal for everybody else.

Yet every day, I sit here with my radar activated. There are far too many imaginary things that move in my peripheral vision. And when you wear glasses and have rotten eyesight, you can’t figure out what you saw anyway. So my knees have taken to pulling my feet up to the chair at regular intervals.

Most importantly, my wife is the only one who saw a mouse on the main floor. My younger son is the only one who saw a mouse upstairs. So way back in the far reaches of my mind I’ve begun to wonder if this was their sick scheme to get us to clean up the house. Intellectually I know that’s not the case, but emotionally I keep clinging to the hope that there isn’t a mouse (or mouse family) living in my house and that it’s a cruel way to get things cleaned up around here.

You never know…I wouldn’t put it past them.