Mouse House

Hello, friend. Thank you for joining me here!

WARNING: This post contains upsetting and/or graphic rodent related content. If you are a member of PETA, a practicing Buddhist, or an avid animal lover, turn back now. Seriously. You do not want to read this. Stop. 

OK! As for the rest of you: buckle your seatbelts and dial up your gross-factor tolerance. I am about to tell you the story of 2020: The Year of the Mouse.

Rewind to February, just before the global pandemic of Covid19 hit New York City. It was a long held dream of mine to take my daughter to Disneyland. When I was a child, my Nana lived in Chula Vista, California, and we visited her every Christmas. Most years, we would make the short drive to The Happiest Place on Earth. Splash Mountain and Main Street and that shining blue castle were a big part of my holiday memories. Eventually, I lived in southern California myself, but as a twenty-something actress trying to get my foot in Hollywood’s door, I didn’t have a lot of extra money or time for amusement parks. So, it was not until I moved back to the east coast and had a child of my own that I longed to return to Disney. I heard that kids do better with the overwhelming nature of Disney when they are at least old enough to walk some of it on their own and have the ability to wait in lines without a total meltdown. Some friends said 5 years old, others 7…there were a lot of opinions. I very much wanted to do it “right,’ because a) have we met? I am a perfectionist, and b) it was a long trip we weren’t going to be able to make again soon. One of my best friends, Julie, lives in LA and has a 10 year old son, Henry. They were ‘members’ at Disneyland and basically experts on the place, and Julie felt that my daughter was ready. Julie also just really wanted us to visit. After I closed ‘The Sound Inside’ on Broadway in January, I suddenly had time to go somewhere. David was performing ‘Paradise Lost’ Off-Broadway through February, and I was kind of on my own with Finley. Granted, she had preschool, but there was a long weekend that coincided with Valentine’s Day. What a perfect way to celebrate love: friendship and childhood wonder together? I bought our plane and park tickets, and we were off. 

Disneyland was great!! Finley was the perfect age to do one full day of fun, focused on meeting princesses and riding in teacups. We both wore sparkly mouse ears and took many smiling pictures. Mickey and Minnie could not have provided us with a better day, and I will always treasure the memories of our visit. But, looking back now—in December—I see that the pleasant, animated version of the ultimate mouses’ house was an ironic and misleading teaser for the main attraction to come. Little did I know there was a very different set of furry creatures just waiting to entertain us in the months ahead.

Cut to late March. We were back in NJ and Coronavirus had bloomed, thrusting the tri-state area into lockdown. We were doing our best to stay sane in a completely unknown and unprecedented situation. I was scared a lot. Very little felt safe. But we were managing, barely. I woke one morning early and made my way into the kitchen for coffee. As I opened the narrow silverware drawer to grab a teaspoon, something caught my eye. Small, black, oblong…was that?? No, no, no…please no. I called up the stairs to David. “Are these mouse droppings????,” I asked, pointing, when he entered. He took one brief look and confirmed my horror. No, no, no!!! There are few things (stalkers and film crews notwithstanding) whose evidence feels more invasive than dirty, disease carrying critters in your house. In your kitchen! Where you EAT! Inside drawers you reach into daily! I was so horrified. Everything itched. I felt ill. And for goodness sake we were stuck inside! With MICE!!! 

David immediately researched home remedies for getting rid of our unwanted guests, while I began the revolting task of clearing, cleaning and disinfecting the kitchen. We already had a box full of surgical gloves for David’s weekly pandemic grocery trips, so I wore those. I regrettably had to use some of our precious lysol wipes for the job, too. I cleared every drawer and cabinet, washed all the contents, vacuumed, wiped, and sprayed the insides with disinfectant. It was my definition of Not Fun. After consulting google and YouTube, David whipped up a batch of peanut butter and baking soda balls.—STOP READING NOW IF YOU DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT MOUSE MURDER— (I’m not gonna warn you again, friend. You decide…) These little round tidbits had the PB mice loved, but they could not digest the baking soda, which would expand in their system and…well, you get it. It’s awful. I was disgusted by their presence and disgusted by this method of counterattack, but there was no way any exterminator was coming inside our house. You need to understand that for the east coast, Covid hit hard and fast. No one went out and no one came in, for months. Other than getting essentials, we were stuck in the house, with every mouse, and we had to figure something out. I am not proud of David’s method, but friend, I was desperate. I have a particular fear of mice and rats and such within my living space. (Also cockroaches, who in the NYC area are sometimes as big as mice, but I digress.) Anyway, this invasion was the stuff of nightmares for me, and that made me willing to look the other way as these death bombs were carefully laid out in place of the cutlery and ziplock bags.

Well, it worked. Sort of. For a while. The contents of the kitchen remained displaced and Operation Baking Soda waged on for weeks. The droppings lessened for a time, and I shrieked in the backyard when I found a curled up carcass. I tried not to imagine his suffering, but I truly felt awful. I didn’t want to condone killing, but we’d not been able to find how they were getting in, and I could not condone their presence in the place we prepared food. We hoped there were only a few and that our efforts would stop them. Throughout April, our war went two steps forward, one step back. I finally stopped looking inside the drawers completely and let David handle things. Until…he left. 

Yep. At the beginning of May, David drove straight through to Minnesota to start work on our farmhouse. If we were going to move before school started in the fall, he had to get the renovations started. We planned it carefully. The virus numbers in Minnesota were not so terrible then. We stockpiled enough food for me and Finley to last at least three weeks. Our neighbors offered help. It was not ideal, but he had to go. Which meant, I was the only thing standing between our house and the varmint hoard. I kept up the PB balls, placing them in drawers before bed each night and looking squeamishly for bite marks and droppings each morning. I kept this up for a couple of weeks until one evening, I had this sudden feeling that I better go feed the mice. That’s right. It had started to feel like they were my pets for all the trouble I was taking to get those balls in there on time. And they were eating little bits still. In May. Clearly, this was not working. Either the recipe was off, or never worked in the first place, or the mice had caught on and were eating around the baking soda somehow. Doesn’t matter. I was not going to feed them anymore. I quit our offensive that night. I cleaned away all traces of the battle and doubled down on disinfectant. And actually, I didn’t see new activity for a while. Meanwhile, I was packing our house and parenting and really too busy to think about something that seemed out of sight. 

Until: one morning in June, I came downstairs to find a bag of popcorn on top of the microwave—on the other side of the kitchen from the utensil drawer—that had been gnawed into, a little trail of droppings all around the scene of the crime. NO, NO, NO!!! I had been so careful! I had kept everything excruciatingly clean. I had put things out of reach and enclosed and, and…they won. I called an exterminator that day. I signed up for the premium package. They promised masks and gloves and they became the only people who entered our house besides us in a 5 month period. It was just non-negotiable for me, and I no longer cared a hoot what kind of poison or trap or voodoo was being employed. I was alone with a kid, packing up every inch of those 1500 square feet, and I needed the vermin out. How could I sell the house with a pest issue? Can you imagine showings in which a potential buyer opened the cabinets to find poop? Nope. My masked heroes arrived the next day and our elimination plan was elevated to shock and awe.

So, here is an irony. While all this was going on, I also had to parent a five year old. Preschool zoom class was a sh&@# show, and I found myself in need of lots of projects to keep her busy so I could prep for our move. Screen time often won, but we did a lot of adult coloring books and other art projects. A couple years earlier, my mom had given Finley a little set of (wait for it…) mouse twins made by the company Maileg, who came in a small box, modeled after a matchbox. They were purchased on a trip to Paris—yeah, remember when International travel was a thing?…sigh. At any rate, those little mice were freaking adorable and had inspired an entire Maileg collection at our house by 2020. We had the king and queen, the sleepy-wakey baby, the bride and groom, the grandparents, the princess and the pea, the mom and dad, and several brothers and sisters. These are seriously bougie toys, all handmade, Danish design. Most moms I know who have bought them have done so almost as much for themselves as for their kids. I may mean me. They have the cutest accessories for these mice, and they seem to top themselves each season in creativity and adorableness. During the spring of 2020, Maileg released a doll house for the mice. It was soooooo cute and soooooo expensive. Around $250, in fact. That was not going to happen. But, it got me thinking. Our growing collection sure could use a place to live—you’re seeing the irony, right? I know. In all my packing, I had unearthed a bunch of random wood boxes and small crates. People had sent us gift boxes for Christmases and Opening Nights, and I had some unfinished craft projects with leftover supplies. Turns out, once I’d pulled it all together and stacked things just so, we could make our own house, complete with bathroom, modge-podged wallpaper, and a rhinestone earring chandelier! See, this is the kind of stuff that brings me joy. Fanciful, romantic, pretty and utterly devoid of reality. We spent a little time each day painting, decorating and glueing. Finley would have a much bigger bedroom on the farm, and it was fun to dream about this house living there.

Jumpcut: that quarantine craft made it to Minnesota. The stuffed mice are right at home in her pale pink, big girl room. It was as sweet as I’d imagined to set up our very own, carefully made mouse world—a pastel version of the way I’d like for all mice to be: silent, clean, and dressed in hand-sewn, ethically sourced fabric outfits made in Denmark. We got mini furniture and accessories for them, including a mop with a mint green metal pail and a tiny bathtub that came with a wooden scrub brush and polka dot shower cap. I am writing this to you, and it feels insane. How could I have made death balls for the real mice on the same days I was lovingly painting the edges of each box metallic gold for the stuffed ones? And how did I not see this hypocrisy until December?? We see what we want to see in order to get through the days, my friend. And that has never been more true than this year. Also, getting back to Disney: I 100% blame Cinderella. I mean, what the heck? Her only friends were the mice that lived in her room and for whom she made tiny clothes. They, in turn, sewed a ballgown for her from her dead mother’s pink dress and those wicked stepsisters’ discards. According to latter day sequels, Cinderella even took her little friends TO THE CASTLE. No wonder I have fantasies around rodent relationships. Why, oh why, couldn’t our real mice be like Minnie or Gus? A little bow here, a tiny coat and vaguely Italian accent, there. I blame you, Walt, I really do. You misled a generation. They do talk about the dark underbelly of the Disney machine, though I don’t think this is what they mean.

At any rate, once in Minnesota, with the Maileg friends ensconced under the eaves, I kind of thought that real mice were in my past. Sure, we live on a farm, but David had already enlisted a trusty Midwest pest control company. They’d been working to address the inevitable problems with all kinds of unwanted creatures for months. In the fall, we went through bat exclusion, attic clean out, the sealing off of the foundation, and many, many rounds of bait stations and traps. After all that, I really wasn’t thinking it would be so bad here. Clearly, I just really wasn’t thinking.

The mouse problems in Minnesota make the mouse problems in New Jersey look like it’s own Disney movie. Those little buggers have lived in this farmhouse with impunity for decades. They have outnumbered the people a hundred-fold for every one of the last 150 years. This is their world, and we are just living in it. We consistently have droppings in the basement. The attic clean-out dumpster was almost as filled with animal excrement as it was with old insulation. Because the bathroom and kitchen are torn apart (and have been since we all arrived in August), there are still spaces between the walls and the floor in those rooms, where you can see earth. We see droppings near those areas, too. Is it really fair to expect anyone to see a real difference between outside and inside in spaces where wind blows through? If I were a critter, I wouldn’t. The only real difference is that “inside” it is slightly warmer, and there is a lady who will let loose a blood curdling scream at the sight of you. 

That has happened several times. The first encounter I had was in October, just as the weather was getting colder. I entered the kitchen (aka: construction site) one evening to do dishes in the utility sink. At the edge of a large corner hole, not covered by the temporary plywood serving as the floor, a tiny head popped up. Our eyes locked, and I let loose a screech that terrified the thing so completely, it left a fine trail of pee in the dirt as it escaped. Hopefully, it ran far, far away from us and our traps. I WANT them to live, just not inside our house. I also don’t want them to DIE in our house. I’m picky, I know. This week brought us to my latest shrieking episode, and it was definitely the most traumatic to date. I was hunting in the basement for Christmas decorations and needed to move the items we had stacked down there. There had been a few dead mice in the basement previously, but David had found and disposed of them. The box I wanted was in the very back of the stone wall corner, behind two fancy beach chairs, still in bubble wrap from the move. I noticed some mouse droppings on top of the outer chair and looked carefully around on the floor and shelves nearby. It seemed clear. Probably some old activity from the small holes in the crumbled walls above. I lifted the front chair away and set it behind me. As I turned back to grab the second chair, I saw it. Suspended on the bubble wrap, somehow stuck there, was a mouse with claws curled as if in mid-race. I let out a horrific wail of terror. And then another. It didn’t move. It was just hanging there, how I didn’t fully understand. It was as if it had fallen between the chairs and died and some awful death liquids glued it in place. It was so disgusting and so improbable and so shocking. I ran toward the stairs as David was running toward me. He knew what it was—I only scream that way at murine encounters. You guys, I know it was dead and I know it was small, but FFS, I was absolutely terrified. My heart was racing. I thought I might pass out. I get it, poor me, the murderer feeling sorry for herself. But it was traumatic. David investigated and couldn’t find the thing at first. He was looking on the ground, like you do for fallen foes. I had to yell down that it was in mid-air. He found it, and another below. He removed them and vacuumed and sprayed with vinegar. He re-arranged the boxes and brought me the Christmas wreath I’d been seeking. Honestly, I was as grateful to him for that as for anything in our entire marriage. He did not judge my fear. He just took over and let me recover. 

We have talked about this with each other, with the pest guys, with the realtor, and with other residents in the area. Mice are and will be an issue. It is a long process to keep them under control in the countryside. We have taken many steps toward that end and will keep doing so. The house is finally sealed up pretty well, except for under the front porch, which must be completely re-built next summer. But the bait stations are fairly full as of today, which means the number of eaters has been reduced greatly. These latest basement victims were probably there for a while (yuck). It is possible that we will see far fewer signs of live activity going forward, thanks to all the actions we’ve taken. I hope so. I’d also prefer to not see (nor smell, god help me) any more signs of deceased activity, but that’s probably fairytale thinking. And going back to fairytales…

 There is another that seems slightly more accurate and especially appropriate during the holidays. Any guesses? I’m thinking of ‘The Nutcracker.’ Have you seen the ballet? We took our daughter to see the New York City Ballet production for the first time one year ago this week, in fact. I raced from Studio 54, immediately after our curtain came down, to join David and Finley at Lincoln Center, just as their curtain went up. It was a dream of mine to take her, and she was enchanted. I loved watching her watch the story unfold. Do you recall in Act One the way the mice are depicted by Balanchine? They are creepy and skittery and zip around with their too-small hands arched into nasty, scratchy paws. Their king is the villain of the story. The toy soldiers, under the command of the Nutcracker himself, must wage a fierce fight against them. When at last the Nutcracker prevails, Clara is taken to the land of sweets by her prince. That is when the Sugarplum Fairy pulls out all the stops with her dancing coffee pals and marzipan maidens. Only after the evil rodents are dead does the ballet get good. When we think of The Nutcracker, we think of Act Two—for good reason! Isn’t it better to be surrounded by lovely, delicious beauty than by spooky, ominous dread? If my life were a dance,  David would be my Nutcracker hero, saving me from what lurks in dark corners. OK, that’s a bit of a stretch, though he does look awfully fine in military garb…

Looking back, it does not surprise me that this vicious year has been filled with creatures that are my personal kryptonite. Because why not? It is the year to face all the fears. I really, really hope 2021 brings health, safety, democracy, peace for all, and the end of all vermin inside our house. I get that I’m dreaming, to a certain extent. I’m resigned to the reality that the battles will go on. It saddens me that I’ve become somewhat inured to all the bad stuff that’s happened this year. I’m so used to seeing signs of critter life that now only hanging corpses make me scream. I’m so used to reading a mean tweet or an unbelievable headline that I glaze over at the sight. We are all so used to the horror of the virus and what it means for our lives that the death toll rolls on and on, without much fanfare. We are numb. We are dulled. We are asleep at the wheel. Because we are just trying to survive. 

I am so sorry that my trying to survive means certain death for our uninvited four-legged guests. But I cannot take care of my family AND take care of them. That’s where I draw the line. On the flip side, I will gladly take care of other humans by wearing a mask. I guess I have a double standard based on species. I sure hope what you need to do to survive doesn’t endanger other people, though I’ll give you a pass on rodents. I hope you’ll stay home this holiday season to keep all of us safe and that said home is well-sealed and filled only with the inhabitants you choose.

Our Minnesota house is still being fought over, but our New Jersey house did sell creature free. I hope that soon this old farmhouse will only be filled with mice of the stuffed, well-dressed variety. I think a kitty may be in our future—once we have real floors. All this will come, in time. And in time, I know I will sit in an audience again, next to my girl, and watch a fairytale dance out of darkness into sweet, sweet light. 

Oh, that America will do the same.