There
are certain parts of home ownership that don’t make the headlines.
Does
it have a second bathroom? That’s a nice feature.
Room
for the dogs to run in the yard? Sure. It’s a question many want
answered.
What
are the school needs? …the commute to work? …the condition of
the furnace and water heater?
All
of this and so much more.
What
about mice? At what point in your bullet list of housing needs
are you asking about mice?
My
guess is, you aren’t. At no point. You don’t ask. Never comes
up. And depending on where you lived growing up, chances are,
it never will.
Most
of us—I’m guessing—never really had to worry about mice. Flies?
Yes. Mice? Not so much. Even if you did grow up with mice around,
the reality was you dealt with it, so you likely never thought
about it when looking for a home of your own. It was a reality—perhaps
a reality of country living—and you just dealt with the reality,
you didn’t view it as a problem.
So,
mice. We’ve put mice in the house. Now let’s create a bit of a
scenario.
You’ve
been noticing some mice activity in the garage. Holes nibbled
in cardboard boxes. Bird seed trails leading away from the storage
containers. A nest in one of the lower drawers of a tool chest.
Mice.
You
head out and pick up a few traps—ok, yes, you do, so no massive
cry of “TRAPS?” from the peanut gallery—pick up a few traps and
set them up. Here’s my question: How do you react when one of
the traps is missing?
Yup.
Missing.
You
head out to the garage in the morning to look at the traps and
see what care might be needed. And there, in a corner where you
had placed one of the traps, there’s no trap. Nothing. Not a bit
of cheese or a smudge of peanut butter on the ground. Look behind
boxes and under lawn mowers and move things around and there’s
no trap.
Got
an answer for that one?
Not
to again encourage the wrath and cries from the peanut gallery,
but there’s a good chance that for a while during the night there
was a mouse running around your garage with a trap attached to
its tail. Might be in your garage right now with the trap still
attached to its tail.
And
all of this, of course, has nothing to do with a mouse or a trap.
Instead,
it has to do with the mysteries of the world and everyday living.
Exaggerated example for a more grounded observation.
We
misplace our keys, then make stupid jokes about how you always
find them in the last place you look. For almost every mystery,
there’s a silly explanation.
Keys
missing? Guess who left them in the pocket of the sweatshirt and
then put the sweatshirt away?
Container
of half-and-half next to your breakfast plate and a cup of coffee
missing? Check the fridge, because chances are you did put something
away, it just wasn’t the half-and-half.
We
try to blame mischievous spirits and laugh it off. But what of
explaining the seemingly obvious unexplainable? Like adding a
mouse to the questions of home buying considerations, there is
a better off not said sensibility to the scenario, where you believe
if you don’t ask the question you won’t have a problem.
Everyday
life doesn’t work that way.
Having
an experience where it wasn’t the coffee mug but actually the
car keys that got placed in the fridge, I can tell you it wasn’t
a mouse to blame. But when people tell you stories about the presents
brought to them by proud cats, understand there is a world of
confusion and blame that some folks simply cannot recognize.