Not exactly Mickey Mouse...

When one lives in the country, there's always something...

I was going up the stairs this morning with a stack of clean laundry and as I got near to the top of the stairs and the second floor hallway, I smelled something. Not a good something, but a foul-smelling odor that you just couldn't ignore. I asked my husband if he smelled anything weird and he said no... but he was doing work at his computer and he tends to focus on just what's on the screen.

I walked around the rooms on the second floor and when I got to the last room (my husband's office) the smell was intense. How could he not have smelled that? Walking around the room like Nancy Drew, I knew for sure that the smell was coming from one of the ceiling vents for the heating and air-conditioning. And directly below that vent, there were brown spots on the carpeting. I had just vacuumed the second floor yesterday, and I didn't see any spots at all.

As I started to clean the carpet under the vent, the smell of the cleaner mixed with the odor of whatever made those spots really got to stinking quite badly, and finally, my husband asked me what on earth made that awful odor.  I pointed up towards the vent, and my husband noticed that the vent itself was soiled with lots of brown spots.

Off went the computer, out came the step-ladder and tool box, and my husband proceeded to unscrew the heating vent... and as soon as he got the vent loose from the ceiling, a dead mouse dropped down to the carpet. I didn't exactly scream, but I came close. I'm not afraid of mice, but I certainly don't want them inside the house, alive or dead. I got a trash bag to put the mouse in (my husband did that part) and then he took the vent outside for a good cleaning. Apparently, the mouse had been up there for quite some time.

Living out in the hills here and surrounded by fields and pastures and woods, there is just no way to keep critters away. You would think that we wouldn't have any mice at all, with one inside cat and two outside cats, but all a mouse needs is a teeny-tiny opening and they can come and go at will. And with a house that's over one hundred years old, I'm sure we don't have a shortage of teeny-tiny openings.

Every once in a while in the middle of the night, we will hear a scurrying sort of noise in one of the walls. We know it's a mouse but in a home this size, how does one go about finding where it is? Usually, the mouse will find its way back outside and off he goes into the pasture, probably to meet his fate with an owl or a hawk. I doubt very much that my well-fed cats even go looking for mice these days, as they're both on the shady side of their nine lives.

Well, the mouse that dropped from our ceiling vent this morning is now encased in a plastic grocery sack and will wait outside in the trash can till pick-up day on Tuesday. I guess I should be thankful that it was only a little mouse because the day a snake drops out of a ceiling vent in this old house, I'm out of here. And I do mean Out. Do not pass Go, do not collect your city-shoes, just Go.