She hath wings

Last Sunday I let out a scream bigger than the one when my son entered the world. Never in my life have I found a mouse in the washing! I asked my husband to help me carry the hamper outside, leaving the other one in the bath. Upon my request, he helped me to check each item of clothing thoroughly; I couldn’t bear to see that mouse again. Nothing was found and I was beginning to think that he felt I was ‘seeing things’. I cringed as I imagined the mouse running down the passageway at night (where I had left the clothes hampers for several days before placing them in the bath), squeezing through a hole in one of them and burrowing into the clothes. How did it get into the house? A couple of years ago when we had a mouse in the kitchen sink cupboard due to the smell of the worm farm scraps, we put aluminium foil in the back of the dishwasher where there was a gap; perhaps it had been displaced.

After my husband carried the clothes hamper inside, he noted Rosie the cat stalking a mouse near the back of the freezer. How could the mouse have gotten inside the house so soon after we carried it out? Unless…

The plot thickened when my daughter called out to me and informed me that her brother had found a tiny mouse out in the back yard and was guarding it. The one I had glimpsed was bigger than that, I remembered. Apart from being stunned, there was nothing wrong with this baby mouse. I trapped it in a soccer cone and my son ran to collect two sand play cups from the outdoor toy box, at my request. “Don’t kill it!”, he begged me. Casting my mind back 30 or so years, I could put myself in his shoes. Stray kittens in my grandparents’ garage, unfit to be given homes, had melted my heart and I pleaded with my parents in a similar way. Sensing he was distraught, I decided that catch and release was the best thing to do.

I must have looked so comical in the green dish gloves which I had forgotten to take off while inside the house. My son and I walked briskly towards a local park and stopped a few hundred metres shy of the entrance. Waiting to be rid of the mouse before it died of shock, I emptied the little baby into the long grass and we walked away.

We were due to go out for the afternoon so we set a trap “just in case” behind the freezer and I returned to the bathroom to retrieve a couple of washing items for soaking. I let out another scream. There was our stowaway, barely moving…in the bath where the washing hamper had been returned. Once again I called upon my husband to help- this time to put it out of its misery. All dealt with, we still wondered about Rosie’s find. Had it been the one that I found in the bath? I didn’t think so. Upon returning home, my thoughts were comfirmed.

As much as I appreciate the council’s efforts to minimise household waste with mini food scrap bins, I can’t help but wonder if it was the smell of rotting food we should have emptied the day before, that brought those germy critters inside again. I hadn’t seen a mouse since I had collected food scraps in a box, waiting to put them in a worm farm. I am pleased to report that we haven’t had any more tiny visitors this week and I have stopped holding my breath whenever I sort the clothes!

Have any small, unwelcome animal visitors entered your home before? Please feel free to share your experiences in the comments or add a link to your own post!