State: Chimney Stack of Idaho.

October 2022

This is when I wonder if I belong here.

Jim is away for work. I open the cabinet doors to check the traps. One is flipped. I leave it. Steep tea. Write in the daily log: one dead mouse under sink.

Yesterday, I loosed two traps out in the sand pits where the previous home owners had a target range and hollered up at raven, Lunch! 

I grab one of the cheap flashlights we’ve stashed everywhere and check a few other traps. The beam of light is a balm. 

It's early enough and cloudy enough with yesterday's rain-snow-rain mix, I flick on other lights and check the battery display: 24.0V. We're in the process of upgrading from lead acid to lithium iron phosphate, losing 1,000 pounds in the switch. I return to under the sink with the yellow gold light beam. The trap is still flipped. And now: two small dark eyes and very still ears are also turned toward me. 

Oh, dear. 

Her back foot is caught and bleeding. There is old peanut butter on the yellow part of the trap (do mice see color?) and she pauses to lick it, then resumes quivering. I nudge her into a big bucket with a piece of cedar from the kindling pile. I take the bucket outside and cry. I cry with the dead ones, too. What do I do? Spring the trap and let her loose? Last time, Jim placed Mouse in a tub of water, as his mother used to. 

I call Laura. Her voice soggy with sleep. I hear her cat Sheeba in the background. Do we get a cat? I'm allergic. Laura listens. Says there's no wrong answer.

The clouds move down the ridge and offer a glimpse of snow still high up among the just-barely gold larch. The first precip in months. We're hungry for it. Clear air to breath. The cottonwoods have all dropped. There's more red-orange in the valley than last year. The road grader came through. Our 86-year old neighbor came out and pounded in ten plastic sticks with orange flags. They log out past us come late winter, and will help keep the road clear; he wants to see the drop off so he knows how far to go with the blade. 

The mouse is outside, foot in the trap. What does my indecision cost? 

There's a William Stafford poem where he (the poem’s speaker) comes across a dead doe on a dark road and knows the body might cause someone to swerve, which would also be deadly. So he gets out of the vehicle, discovers the doe is pregnant, and pushes her over the edge.

"Traveling through the Dark” by William Stafford

I toss crumpled newspaper and kindling into the wood stove. Last night, I turned it down too low and the fire went out. It’s only been lit since Thursday. No hard frost yet. I can hear Mouse struggling outside in the bucket that used to hold ice cream. The thin blue plastic handle is the same one swinging from Herman’s – Jim’s dad – thick hand as he came up from the basement with the evening’s dessert. 

Mouse decides for me. She has climbed up the side of the ice cream vat, leaving five small dark droppings caught around the edges. She perches on the slim top edge, the trap weighing her down. She stills. I lift the trap, grip the copper bar that snapped her foot, and let her free. She is quick to the woodpile and gone. A small blop of red blood on the trap's edge. I drop it back in the bucket, drop the bucket on the ground and return inside. Wash hands. Sip tea. Check the fire. Write the story. I’ve stopped crying.