Among the benefits of leaving on a vacation for the Bahamas in May and having a deluge of biblical proportions fall upon the Boston area while we were gone is that my status as a prophet has gone way up. The main rationale for going on vacation this year in May was that last year, when we got married in May, we couldn’t help but notice that it rained 90% of the time. This combined with our second date on Memorial day when Sarah was violently sea sick on a whale watch that occurred during a hail and sleet storm. I also add my own past experience of trying to hike Mt. Chicorua in May and accidentally lighting my tent on fire by trying to warm me and Pete Forsythe up from a sleet storm we had hiked in using the camping stove inside the tent. So my personal experience with May in Boston is that it is a violently cold and rainy month, which is why we went away. But I do enjoy hearing that people respect how applying such wisdom could allow us to avoid an enormous basement flooding, sump-pump activating, disaster.
Our own challenge came when we returned home and had unpacked all of our shoes to place them into the closet where we store coats and shoes. Sarah stuck her nose into the closet and discovered that it smelled awful. Given that it had been at 100% humidity for about 6 days and that the rain could easily have penetrated the roof one theory for the horrible smell was that some old sandals, golf shoes, and other sweat filled beasts had gotten activated into smelling terrible. This was my hypothesis. I was in denial.
Sarah’s hypothesis was based on the incident prior to our 4AM exit when we were packing in the early morning for our flight. We aren’t normally wandering about our condo at this hour so it is possible to observe things that aren’t normally visible to us. In this case Sarah was in the kitchen and bumped into a small black mouse. The last time this had happened Sarah had let out a primal shriek that led me to believe, when I heard it from another room, that something terrible had happened to Madeline along the lines of her falling off of the refrigerator. This time Sarah was more calm and she just jumped but the mouse was as frightened as she was and rather than returning to a hole in the wall the mouse ran around the corner from the kitchen and into the open door to the closet with the shoes and coats. I had been rummaging for Tivas so the door was open. We spent a good portion of time on the cab ride over to the airport discussing how we were going to finally take the plunge and commit to purchasing a stray cat or kitten at the animal shelter.
Sarah’s opinion was that the smell in the closet, a musty sweaty rotten smell reminiscent of a basement, was the smell of that mouse dead in the closet. It wasn’t like we had closed the door on that mouse. We had left it open expressly to avoid having a dead trapped mouse in our closet upon return but it was left as a possibility. But I still clung to my musty rain theory. We had been trapped in Miami when we were returning due to massive rain that closed the airport for six hours and I could imagine it activating smells in shoes in the spring time.
We were delayed in Miami airport for so long that we got to listen to Bush’s 8PM speech about immigration reform although we had originally been scheduled to make a 3:30 connection back to Boston. I tend to think of the strategy for immigration reform when it comes to the mice in the condo. Our job is to reduce the opportunity for the mice (don’t leave food around) , seal the borders (plug holes that mice come through), and have appropriate border security forces (a cat), and reasonable penalties for illegal immigration (death by cat or if trapped in a humane trap – return to the wild 5 miles away). They have a five step plan and so do I my problem has been getting commitment, consensus, and resources to execute all areas of the plan. I wonder what the government’s issues are?
Madeline had enjoyed the airport. She liked interacting with the faces of people smiling at her and she discovered that Sarah’s phone was the most fun toy she had ever gotten her hands on.
By Friday night my excuse for not going into the closet to clean it out was that it was dark. We had returned home on Monday night. The real reason was that I was procrastinating the event and didn’t want to get too involved with death. So instead we watched the finale of Season 5 of Six Feet Under. In the end everyone dies in some cool scenes flashing into the future with a great song playing in the background. It was a good ending except for one dumb guffaw killing off Keith through gunshots while he is guarding money in an armored truck. It was just dumb but we played the ending scene with the cool song about 5 times. In one frame you can see Alan Poul, one of the producers, at a funeral for the mother. After that we watched Capote but Sarah fell asleep before they executed the killers by hanging. I had expected more from it, to be super curious about reading “In Cold Blood” but the movie was flat and long. I understood why Sarah fell asleep.
But by Saturday morning after having eaten our ritual breakfast at Brueggers I had run out of options and it was time to clean out the closet. I pulled out both bins of shoes, took out the luggage, and took all of the jackets out of the closet until it was bare. No dead mouse. I threw out a number of shoes that seemed to have offensive smells or were rendered useless due to holes in the bottoms out of my bin of shoes. Sarah went through her bin and that was when she found it, the suicide bomber.
The mouse in her shoe bin was grey. I am not sure whether black mice turn to grey or not so it could have been a different mouse but this was a dead mouse. It was a suicidal mouse trying to drive us out of our apartment with it’s stench. I doubt it was totally conscious of the effect that it has on us. Waichi is moving out of her apartment downstairs. Part of her reason for not buying the condo at a good price from the guy who wants to offload it is that she can’t deal with the mice dying. We bumped into her this morning as she was moving her boxes into a U-Haul in front of the building. She found a dead mouse that had been rotting for a long time behind her sofa two days ago and refrained from calling me to scrape it out because it was two in the morning. She had called me down one day about six months ago to scrape one out from under her radiator in her kitchen. It’s funny to see her needing my help because she is a kidney transplant surgeon and goes on missions with Doctors without borders to war torn or disaster areas but she is disgusted by dead mice.
But the effect of the mice rotting in closets, under floor boards, behind couches, under radiators, in cupboards full of sunflower seeds meant for birds, is the same everywhere. We have a dread of it and makes us want to run away to somewhere else. Nobody likes death in their own home.
