Nov 11, 2021 4 min read

“Poor little fella.”

That was my son’s response when I texted him about the latest crisis in my house. I’d gone down to the basement to switch the laundry when I saw a tiny brown mouse dead on the floor in front of the furnace.

“He just came in to get warm,” my son said.

He knows how I feel about all uninvited furry friends, and apologized for not being around to help.

“Put on a glove, pick it up and toss it outside,” he said, knowing even as he said it what a big ask that was. Instead, I put an empty box over it, then another and another, until the mouse was safely ensconced under a tower of cardboard, the pea in the “Princess and the Pea.”

The mouse was out of sight but not out of mind. What had killed him? Did his death by the furnace indicate he was felled by carbon monoxide? Was that little mouse the canary in my coal mine, come to sacrifice his life for mine?

As timing would have it, I was due for a service call from the furnace man. That morning I noticed the thermostat had gone blank.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” I said when I greeted him at the door. My emotional tone was such that he probably expected me to then tell him I was pregnant with his child … twins!

He looked at me as if I had two heads.

“Follow me,” I said as I led him to the furnace.

“Under these boxes is a dead mouse,” I said. “I will pay you $10 to get rid of it.”

He lifted the boxes and said, “Yep” then picked up the mouse by the tail, walked it to the door and tossed it into the woods.

“Do you think it died of carbon monoxide poisoning?”

“I doubt it,” he said as I led him upstairs to look at the thermostat.

It was out of batteries; he put in a couple of my AAAs and got things working again. Back downstairs, he checked the furnace and found no risk of carbon monoxide. He couldn’t say how the mouse had died.

The service call cost me $130, plus another $10 for the mouse mitigation. It was worth every penny.

“Those mice come in groups,” he said as I handed him the 10 spot. I’m glad he accepted the tip because, if he hadn’t come along, I would have been luring the UPS guy into the house to get rid of the mouse. Or flying my son in from the west coast to save me.

It’s ridiculous, I know.

By this age most men and women have overcome their fear of harmless little rodents. It wasn’t a snake that crawled into my house, after all, or a coyote, or one of my yard groundhogs. Just writing that sentence made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I’m happier when I know the only living and breathing things living in this house are my little dog and me.

That afternoon I went to the hardware store to buy a carbon monoxide detector, just in case, and some mouse traps. I sprang the extra money for the kind that lets the mouse crawl into the little tunnel, kills it instantly, and then lights up to tell you something’s in there.

If things come to that, I will toss the whole thing in the trash without having to see the mouse. If I don’t reuse the trap, I waste about $10. That’s the going rate for mouse removal around here.