Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Shhhh... I think they're gone.

I discovered I had a mouse problem this past spring when a friend of mine visited from New York City.

Pulling out the futon, which had been folded up against the wall, I noticed the corner had been chewed in a suspiciously mousie way.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Must have happened at my past apartment."

When I was moving, I came back to pack more stuff and found tiny corpses all over my apartment. My landlord had poisoned them.

I admit, when I first discovered evidence of a mouse, I was in denial. My mind was working in strange ways. I had just rescued a box of my items from my mom's attic and had noticed mouse holes in some of the clothing. So my first thought was, "Did it ride up here in the box?"

"So," I asked my brother on the phone that week, trying to sound casual. "How do you know if you have a mouse?" I told him about the cushion.

He told me that I should check and find out if there were mouse droppings there. "Mice always poop where they eat," he said.

I checked. Mouse poopie. Great.

"So, what do I do now?" I asked.

He suggested traps, and then going around my house looking for brush. "That's how mice get in," he said. "Make sure there's nothing against the foundations."

I thought of the abandoned lawnmower my previous landlord had left behind, which was now suffocated by tall weeds.

I immediately did nothing.

In the weeks that followed, the mice got bolder. I'd see a glimpse of them, scurrying across the floor. I would shriek, and my dog would bark. They sat in the walls at night squeaking happily, having long mouse discussions about the delicacies of futon cushions and dog food.

Visiting some friends that weekend, they admitted they had mice, too. They used live mousetraps, bought at Home Depot. Okay, why not?

I scoured the shelves of Home Depot, looking for live mousetraps. The ones I found looked far too small for the job, unless they were the teeny-tiny mice I'd had in the previous place. I bought them anyway, put blobs of peanut butter in the back and left them in the kitchen. They kept tripping themselves, especially when my dog, Una, ran by them in one of her excited moods.

That's when I discovered Mouse Away. It's an all-natural formula that combines peppermint oil with spearmint oil. You can order it in essential oil form or in sachets. Place them where the mousies congregate and the mousies will leave. They apparently hate the smell. Well, it was worth a shot.

I ordered them from their web site and waited. When I returned from my trip to Otakon, the Mouse Away Solid had arrived. They were little white cloth bags that smelled strongly of mint. I immediately placed some near the futon, near the big bag of dog food and a couple other places.

I didn't really expect it to work, but within a couple days, the excited squeaking noises stopped. There was a distinct absence of mouse poo near my dog's food dish in the morning. So it seems this might have done the trick.

If it did, it makes me amazingly happy. Poison is out of the question, since I have a dog. And snap-traps which kill the mice would be awfully depressing. Even the live traps had me a bit nervous; I imagined myself driving a mousie out to the country only to have it escape in the truck. And plus, I just know that as I was releasing the mouse I'd be worrying that a hawk would swoop down after I left, or that the poor mouse would miss all his mousie friends and die of loneliness, trying to find his way home.

Wouldn't it be great if we could take care of all our pests with a natural botanical? I'm sure there would be a market for Boss Away or Jerk Away or Ex-Boyfriend Away.

I think I'm on to something.

Copyright 2003 by Alyce Wilson

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