Trouble in the Fruit Bowl

On Monday, I went to make lunch for the 5YO and when I reached for a peach from the fruit bowl, I was surprised to find bite marks in not one, but all three peaches. Not human-sized bite marks, if you get what I'm saying.

I proceeded to freak out quietly while calling up the neighbor to come over and help me determine if this was a mouse we were dealing with or something bigger.  We went with mouse simply so I wouldn't lose control of my bowels. I flung the peaches into the compost (painful since they were perfectly ripe and delicious), and then placed an urgent request for Husband to return that evening with mousetraps. We tried to go about our business as usual, but when I returned to the kitchen a few hours later, there was a big bite out of a plum!

I dragged the 5YO out of the house to the relative safety of the mosquito-and-poison-ivy-infested yard. I immediately updated the neighbors. The neighbor boy, also age 5, had a few possible theories about this. One was that one of our cats had come back from the dead with a hankering for the sweet taste of earth fruit. Not impossible, I said, but if it were Mr. Nathan, he would have done it in plain sight, dispensing with any complicated guerilla tactics in favor of guilty looks. And if the zombie cat in question happened to be Sidney, her bites would have been taken out of me. The second hypothesis was that Husband didn't want to go to work, so he hid in the basement all day until he got really hungry and had to come up for a snack. This was actually a very plausible scenario—except for the fruit. No, it wouldn't have been fruit, it would have been a spicy chicken sandwich.

So as not to tip off Husband in case he was indeed the culprit, I snuck off to the hardware store myself to procure all manner of traps and snares, then deployed them on the sly. The next morning, I was very relieved to find no husbands or partially decomposed pets inside. There was, however, a large, plump mouse (not a rat—it had a furry tail). I like to think she died quickly and happily, with a belly full of fruit and the triumph of her unexpected peanut butter discovery still fresh in her mind. I had a harder time reconciling the three smaller ones. : (

But, hey, that's life. Let that be a lesson to the rest of the vermin: Stay out of my fruit bowl. Now I have to go triple-sterilize that thing.

Comments

[Michele]

Do not, I repeat DO NOT buy a black light and shine it around your house. Apparently you can see mouse wee wee that way. I prefer to live in sweet ignorance, assuming that because the Zapper does it job in my basement, no one gets upstairs. THEY JUST DON'T.

[newlywed]

Ick! Mice are the worst! Especially since they look all pathetic once you finally trap them.

[Sheryl]

LOL! Great post! I love the zombie cat idea-- sounds exactly like something my son would say.
Very gross, overall, though.

[marla]

Ah, great post! Reminds me of my sister's stint working in merchandising for Saks, when they did some sort of holiday display by decorating with chocolate. Every morning more brazen rodent nibbles, and despite that there were always customers who couldn't resist several-days-old, un-covered, nibbled chocolate and would grab some and eat it off the display anyway! See...your kitchen right on par with Saks 5th. Feel better now?

[snippyscissors]

the nights turned cool last week in the northwoods, and so the mice start looking for cozy places to winter. unfortunately for them, this house is not as cozy as they would like. we've got a dozen under our belts so far, 5 live catch and the rest not so much. the live ones went into a 5 gallon pail (usually reserved for the fish we will kill and eat) and released a mile down the road adjacent to a neighbor's house that we don't like so much. none this morning, so i will take that as a sign i am winning the war. (ps. don't ever read mrs. frisby and the rats of nimh if you ever think you will have to kill small rodents!)

[Johnna Gale]

I accidentally left a tomato out overnight. I had done this before with no consequence. But this tomato had nibbles out of the bottom. We've yet to catch the critter, but I'm thinking it's gone now.
Mice can be hard on a kitchen, I know, but I'd rather have mice than the other option...

[Sara]

Heebie jeebies.

[Susanna]

Skin crawling. My devoted cat is still alive and has delivered not one but 3 mostly dead but not enough dead mice to me IN BED at 3 a.m. But I guess I'll cling to the fact that they haven't made it to my fruit bowl before being captured.