Of Mice and Women

Mice—for being such little critters, they sure scare the heck out of a lot of people.

I’ve never been scared of mice. Well, at least not in the way that they scare people in cartoons, where someone jumps on a chair screaming at the site of one.

That said, I’m not too thrilled about them either. Like unless I had one as a pet, I don’t want one snuggling up near me.

But there have been a couple times in my life where they tried getting a little too close.

Years ago, I was driving my car in the winter, and this horrible smell began to come from the vents when I had the heat on. (If you must know, it smelled like pee. Actually, warm pee.) It was disgusting.

My husband popped the hood, but didn’t see anything. Then again, my husband is not a mechanic.

We dropped the car at our mechanic to see what was going on. He called to say that he had found a mouse nest all nestled snug in my engine. During cold months, he said, mice like to find warm places to nest, and I guess the heat from my engine was the perfect place.

I didn’t ask if any mice lost their lives because I drove. I didn’t want to know.

Fast forward a number of years…About a month ago, I went to a local farm to purchase some flowers for our garden. Since I went by myself, I believed that I had turned into a celebrity gardener (much like when I go to the grocery store, I think I’ve turned into Julia Child), and as a result, I bought a ton of flowers. Seriously. Like almost too many…

The husband of one of the partners in the farm walked me to my car to load the flowers in. When I opened the back door on the driver’s side, I was shocked to see a gray mouse standing there on the inside of the door trim, just looking up at me.

Oh. My. God…

Now, I want to stress that I wasn’t petrified of said mouse. Truth be told, it was actually kind of cute. But here’s what happens to me when I stumble upon small creatures—I forget that they are usually more afraid of us than we are of them. 

Mr. Whiskers, as we’ll call him, ran…but not out of my car.

So I told the guy who had been helping me—and I said it very calmly—hey, there’s a mouse in my car.

“There’s a mouse in your car?” he asked, as people usually do when they can’t believe what you’ve just said.

“Yeah. He was right here, but now he’s gone,” I answered.

So I opened the driver’s door.

There was Mr. Whiskers looking at me again.

“Hey! Here he is again!” I said to the guy.

By the time he came up to the front of the car, Mr. Whiskers (who must have won the gold at the Rodent Olympics this year) was gone.

Then he looked into the spot between my door and the engine.

“Wow—you’ve got something in there,” he said noncommittally. So here I was at a farm with some God-only-knows-what in between my car door and the engine that probably was housing 4,567 mice.

Again, I want to stress that I wasn’t afraid of the mouse. But 4,566 of his friends joining him would definitely creep me out a bit.

Luckily, I wasn’t far from home. But that ride seemed like it took forever.

Because all I could imagine was that I had disturbed the mice, and they were going to come out of everywhere jumping all over my face, neck, and arms while I was driving, causing me to crash into whatever was coming the other way. Probably something like a truck of pigs or chickens or something else that would end up all over the road freaking me out.

I made it home unscathed. I didn’t even take any of the flowers out of the car, but instead, I waved frantically to my husband who was power washing the patio. 

“What’s going on?” he asked after coming over to the car, which I was rapidly walking away from.

“There seems to be a mouse in my car and he and all his friends built some kind of Mouse Condo in between the door and the engine,” I said.

He reached his hand in—WAS HE CRAZY?—and began pulling out stuffing that looked like it had hair in it.

That was enough for me. I was now officially grossed out. And, of course, thinking that it was only a matter of time until 4,567 mice jumped all over my husband. Shudder…

Brad came into the house about a half hour later. “Wow, you should have seen all the stuff they had in there—they even had pieces of cardboard,” he quipped. Then he added, “Guess we need to take your car out more.”

Yes. Yes, we do. Because even though times are hard, I refuse to become the neighborhood Mouse Uber.

 Michele “Wojo” Wojciechowski, when she’s not opening her car door and then jumping away, you know, just in case, writes “Wojo’s World®” from Baltimore. She’s also the author of the award-winning humor book Next Time I Move, They’ll Carry Me Out in a Box. You can connect with Wojo on Facebook or on Twitter.

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