Nov 13, 2018 4 min read

The grass is been cut for the final time. The weed whacker has been cleaned and put away. The lawn mower has taken up its winter residence in the back of the barn. It is now the side-by-side’s turn to shine. Daily, it will make the trek to check on the cows, to haul the firewood, to carry buckets of feed to the pigs.

All these changes happen annually around the same time that the clocks turn back. That stinking clock change that means the end of the evening daylight and the beginning of the long darkness of winter. The commute home in pitch blackness. The requirement for electric light at the dinner table. The vague “wood and smoke” smell to my clothes from the fireplace being our primary heat source.

These changes spell out two challenges for me: one, I am on constant patrol for mice. And two, I have a hard time staying awake until a bedtime that is respectable for a person older than 5.

One would think that with two cats living in my home I would have no issues with mice, and yet I must set the traps. It’s not that my cats won’t chase them. No, they’ll chase them all over the house. They just won’t kill them or eat them.

The other morning when I woke up, I heard the subtle yet distinct sound of a mouse in the foyer downstairs. I peered over the railing from my bedroom and saw a mouse cornered by a semi-circle of felines. They were staring at it, waiting for it to try to escape. When it had caught its breath, it did attempt to scurry past them, and they batted it back and forth until it went back into the corner. After some time of this cruelty, the mouse managed to get past them and you could hear cat claws scratching across the kitchen hardwood in an attempt to recapture it.

When I tiptoed downstairs, I found them staring at the base of the sink, but no mouse was to be seen. My son was at the island in the kitchen eating cereal and told me the mouse had escaped behind the cabinet. We were able to retrieve him later, because the cats had done enough damage that he didn’t make it far. But I have decided a trap, although equally deadly, is less cruel.

Problem two, I have discovered, is that I like to go to bed when the sun goes down. This currently means it is a struggle for me to remain awake past 5:30 p.m. Most days I could not care less about dinner. My whole goal in life is to get home from work, put my pajamas on, and crawl into bed. As a wife and mother, I realize I have other people to be concerned about, and other responsibilities to fulfill.

For this reason, I manage to make it through dinner, and most nights, I even load the dishwasher. Then I will hang out on the couch for what seems like a respectable amount of time. Then I’ll say, “Why, would you look at the time,” and act as though it’s the first time that evening that I have thought about the cool sheets and fluffy pillow and thick comforter that await me upstairs.

I’m hopeful that as my body adjusts to the new time schedule, and as the days will begin again (next month) to gain moments of daylight, that this will pass again for another year. I can honestly say I’m already hoping for spring.