In My Own Backyard . . . And Front . . . And Side, Part 6 and Last

When I was growing up we had mice in our Santa Monica home from time to time. We might find their droppings on kitchen counter tops, in kitchen drawers, or even in dresser drawers. It kind of makes you sick to see mouse scat on your silverware or your clothing. I can still hear my mother shriek, “Oh! Filthy little things.” And me. I can hear me shriek, too. My mother would clean and clean and set her traps and hope. She was usually successful; I had to empty many mouse traps. Not a job I ever sought.

One day we began to notice a smell in the kitchen. My mother looked for days but couldn’t find the problem. Meanwhile, the smell began to take over the room until it was unpleasant to take our meals there. Hard to forget that smell. It finally drove my mother to desperate measures.

“Carol,” she said, “I’m sure something has crawled in here and died, maybe a mouse. You’re going to have to get down and pull everything out of the cereal cupboard and find it.” Her desperate measures but my job somehow, and, again, not a job I sought. The cupboard was the kind that turns a corner and extends into darkness. Who knew what might leap out and bite my hand? But I did it. And I found the problem. It was a mouse. He had gnawed his way in and couldn’t get out. He died nose down in a box of Cream of Wheat.

Mickey Mouse is a lie, by the way.

I also had a brief encounter with rats, two of them, on a cobbled street in Quebec early one morning. We stood a while looking at each other, unsure who was more surprised, then they pushed on up the hill in no particular hurry. You know, like they owned the town. On their way to breakfast, I figured, and hoped that where I later ate lunch wasn’t where they had earlier eaten breakfast. They were ugly, by the way, and no doubt influenced my unfavorable review, years later, of the popular cartoon movie Ratatouille.

The thing that makes a rodent a rodent, the distinguishing characteristic, is its incisors, upper and lower, which are continually growing—continually, as in always. Hence the rodent’s need to gnaw continually so that his teeth don’t outgrow his mouth, I guess. I don’t remember Ratatouille showing us that fundamental rat behavior. It’s a behavior that doesn’t go well with what I want going on in and around my home, by the way. That and their propensity for sneaking into, and apparently wanting to hang out in, places where I don’t want them, places I consider mine.

And what does all this have to do with squirrels? Well, they are my rodent du jour, you know, and they are no different from any other rodent.