Rice and Mice: A Cat-astrophe

Love can drive people to do some pretty crazy things. So can fear of mice. The first is why I got married and had a baby; the second is the reason I got a cat.

Yeah, that's right: a cat.

At the risk of offending—something I'm getting pretty good at doing—the cat people among you, I have always been a full-blooded dog person. (When faced with the question of dog or cat. Wider options allowing, I'm more of a fish person, actually.) I won't say I swerve to hit cats or go out of my way to kick them, but I just don't care for their attitudes. Also, their sixth sense that allows them to find and bother people who don't like cats has always riled me. But, desperate times call for desperate measures.

We came home Sunday night and opened our kitchen cupboard looking for some dinner. What we found was a mouse stealing our rice. We'd known we had a mouse in our wall, but this made it all very real. I flipped. Alex kept telling me to calm down, but all I could think of were its little feet scurrying around and spreading diseases through my cupboard. I sat in the farthest room from the mouse's last known position and refused to believe that there was a mouse in my house. (There's nothing cute about mouses in houses, by the way. Dr. Seuss, I WOULD NOT WOULD NOT do anything with a mouse!)

After that, I got mad. How dare that mouse eat our food and live in our house? If only we had caught it before it discovered sustenance! Was it that my house wasn't clean enough? I would have cleaned my house better if it would have kept away rodents. And then I just got sad because I knew I could have kept my house cleaner (although, admittedly, this probably would have happened regardless of how clean things were). And as I sat and thought about all of the grossness I would now have to scrub away due to our furry little friend with the scurrying feet, I have to admit—I sort of shut down.

Once I had cycled through the first four stages of loss and grief, I was finally able to accept that we had a mouse in the house. It took at least a few hours of refusing to go into the kitchen for fear that . . . well, okay, I don't know exactly what I was afraid of, but I think it involved rodents infected with the Hantavirus jumping out of my cupboard and attacking me. Looking back now, I can see that was ridiculous, but it was real to me at the time. I also think it was made worse by the fact that Alex told me we were dealing with a black rat at least eight inches long not counting the tail.

This was an interesting experiment in psychology, because when I saw that mouse in our cupboard it was just that—a mouse. And it was brown. But after hearing that it was a large black rat, I started to think back and “remember” just how wrong I was. Yes, of course. It WAS black. And now that I think of it, it did resemble the rat from Lady and the Tramp (which, by the way, just caused me a bit of anxiety after looking at pictures of said rat). How did I not see it before?

Well, we (and by we, I mean Alex) set up a trap and caught the pest by the next morning. And when Alex showed me the little brown mouse, I panicked because WE DIDN'T GET HIM!

Alex assured me that we had. But we didn't! The one we saw was bigger and black; it was a rat! Wasn't it?

Nope. It wasn't. To quote Alex, “I only told you that because you were being . . . lame. I wanted to justify your fear.” Or feed it. Pfft. I had totally reprogrammed my memory to see what I thought I saw. Which totally happens a lot. See here for more on that.

Most of the time, I'm fine with pests. Spiders? I don't like them, but I can deal. Normal sized non-venomous snakes? I'd be a bit freaked out if one randomly found itself in my kitchen cabinet, but I feel like I would feel okay with removing it. Probably with my bare hands. But mice? Not okay. I think, as I've mentioned once or twice, it's their diseases and their scurrying little feet. Because they can scurry right up your leg and infect you with Hanta before you can say Jack Robinson. Gross.

Anyway, in between listening to just how disgusting I found rodents, my mom suggested some ways we could take care of this problem: Seal up our house, trap them, and get something that would eat them. I thought maybe we'd set a snake loose in our attic—or better yet—invest in a Basilisk, but after weighing the pros (no mice) and cons (finding one, explaining it to our guests—and in the case of the basilisk, possible petrification) of both these animals, my mom said she was actually meaning a cat. Hmm . . . a cat. It could work.

So, the very next day I was all over the local Facebook yard sale pages (like a mouse all over rice—too soon, too soon!) in order to find a cat. Then, I called Alex to ask if he could pick it up on his way home from work. He was a *little* surprised since it had only come up once, and we had interpreted the brief discussion completely differently. I came away thinking we had decided to get a cat, but he came away totally unsuspecting. And, now we have a cat. I like to think of it as payback for the whole rat incident.

We've been thinking about what to name it since it doesn't answer to its previous “name,” Oreo. I suggested that we name our cat Stevens (Hehe, Cat Stevens . . . never mind), but we actually think it's a girl. Which is why I just decided we could name her Willa Cat-her instead. But don't tell Alex, he is, once again, totally unsuspecting.

I guess that scores two points for cats: 1. They catch and eat mice. 2. You can name them anything--even things you wouldn't name your children--and they don't know any better.