FarmWife has posted regarding this subject,
Lori has posted about this, and so I too, must share my rodent adventures.
Once upon a time, in the house in which I grew up, we had a dishwasher. This dishwasher was a little on the old side, but it still worked just fine. It was noisy, but the dishes were clean. That was all that mattered.
Each night, after dinner, the dishwasher would be "soaped" and started. Before bed, Dad would empty the dishwasher, put away the dishes, let the really wet items air dry on the drain board overnight...you know the drill.
Well, one night, after said running of dishwasher, Dad opened it up, and jumped back about 3 feet. Mom, who happened to be in the kitchen, shrieked as I've never heard her shriek before and start screaming at the top of her lungs "Kill it! Get it out of my house now!!!!!!" and she bolted to the master bedroom, not to be seen until morning. Dad yelled for help, and I came running, only to find a rather dazed, somewhat steamed, and very wet brown mouse staggering around our kitchen floor.
Somehow, the stupid thing had managed to get into the house, behind the dishwasher and then into the dishwasher, where it sat through the entire cycle...I am still not sure how that mouse survived, but I felt bad scooping it up with an old cat litter scoop into a paper bag and setting it free in the backyard. I felt as though the poor little bugger deserved a medal for his valor. After all, he had been scrubbed thoroughly, disinfected, washed, and all but air-dried...
But alas, it was not to be. The next day, my father went to the store and purchased several traps, baited them, and began snapping up mice left and right...
That is nothing compared to the ickiness of the next event however...the wall that separated our garage from the basement stairs was finished with sheetrock that was painted on the inside of the house, and just good old sheetrock on the garage side...after a hot summer, we began to notice a bit of rancid odor that got worse as the summer progressed...the hotter the day, the worse the smell. My mother, in her infinite cleanliness actually scrubbed the garage with bleach water, thinking that somehow, some way we had managed to leave rotting vegetation or food on a pair of outdoor-only shoes...the smell returned as the bleach odor cleared out. My father began to think that something was wrong with the sheetrock...perhaps it had gotten wet and the wood was mildewed?
He spent the better part of one Saturday carefully moving all the items on the wall and floor around the worst of the odor, and began the arduous task of removing the sheetrock carefully, not damaging it, so if it was clean we could use it again. As the piece he cut came out of the wall...the stench magnified and overpowered most of us. I stuck it out, and as I helped lift away the 2 x 3 section, we noticed that the back was sort of fuzzy. We assumed mold from something...and peered into the cavity between the studs and found not mold but a pile of mouse bodies in varying states of decay.
Again, somehow, they found a hole and wiggled their way into the wall during the cold winter and got stuck, and died, and started decomposing in our wall...
I would much rather meet Reepicheep and his cronies than repeat that experience if I had to have a run-in with a rodent.
I would by far rather never meet another one in my lifetime. Not even in a cage, not even as a lump in my friend's Redtail Boa's body after being consumed...
I shall now go and disinfect myself after just recalling those situations..
SHUDDER
No comments:
Post a Comment