by Julie Wittes Schlack
City Mice
boundary (n.)
“that which indicates the limits of anything,” 1620s. Strictly, a visible mark indicating a dividing line, a bound being the limit or furthest point of extension of any one thing.
The old wooden house directly behind ours is being renovated. Razed from the inside is more like it, hollowed out, leaving only its 19th century façade intact. And as a consequence of this demolition, we’ve been infested by mice. Or mouse. It scampers over the granite splash guard in the kitchen so quickly that I can’t make out any personally identifiable features before it disappears behind the stove. So we could have one mouse, we could have an entire family. I only know that when I walk into the darkened kitchen and turn on the light, I must brace myself for the sight of a small rodent racing across the counter like a truant caught shoplifting. And when I see it, my stomach leaps to my throat.
I didn’t used to be a wimp. I’m a veteran camper. I’ve slept under the stars and in a tent with the fast, moist breath of a moose right outside the cloth window. I eat berries right off the branch without washing them (yes, I’m that bold). I’ve sat on my own haunches in wondrous silence watching deer and caribou, mice and marmots, grizzly bears and salmon scamper and lope, nibble and chomp.
But that was on their turf. They were supposed to be there, and I knew I was a respectful guest, just passing through. Now they’re on my turf — inside my kitchen – and it doesn’t feel like cohabitation. Inside and outside have gotten confused, and it feels like invasion. I once read a study about people who were asked to drink their own saliva from a glass. Most refused, repelled at drinking what they swallowed at least once a minute.
Context is everything.
This inversion of the boundary between nature as a place I visit and home as a place I live has shaken me.
Raccoon
invasion (n.)
mid-15c., invasioun, “an assault, attack, act of entering a country or territory as an enemy,” from past-participle stem of Latin invadere “to go, come, or get into; enter violently, penetrate into as an enemy, assail, assault, make an attack on
Many years ago, when our bedroom skylight was still new, we were awoken one night by the sound of a precise tapping, like an executive’s well-manicured nails on a conference room table. Looking up, saw an animal sitting on the skylight window directly overhead. At first we thought it was a cat, but then realized the oddly womanly shape – pear-shaped, with wide hips over its planted paws – was too big to be feline.
Then the animal scampered off the skylight, over the peak of the roof, and dropped down to the lower, flat roof outside our window. We heard it land, tiptoed to the window, and raised the shade to see an enormous raccoon, sitting on its haunches, its front feet perched on the outside window sill, gazing in at us like a child thief, with big adorable eyes. But those claws could have ripped open the window screen with a single swipe. This endearing furry face could sink its rabid teeth into our tender bare wrists in a heartbeat, and then take off after our sleeping children.
“Shoo,” Mark yelled. Realizing that her window of opportunity had slammed shut, she dropped to all fours and trotted off.
Mark went back to bed, but I pointlessly patrolled the hall outside our daughters’ bedrooms until my pounding heart settled.
Squirrels
exile (v.)
c. 1300, from Old French essillier “exile, banish, expel, drive off” (12c.), from Late Latin exilare/exsilare, from Latin exilium/exsilium “banishment, exile; place of exile,” “to wander”
Last week, we awakened to fierce scratching sounds on the roof, as if an animal was trying to claw its way through the shingle and the plywood below it. Interspersed with the scratching was a furious banging. Perhaps it was an acorn, but it sounded like a stone being repeatedly pounded against the base of our now deaf and blind satellite dish. This was not a simple nocturnal scamper across our roof, not an animal building a nest against the sheltering wall of our chimney.
No, this was a wild, angry, persistent break-in attempt. There was some rodent or marsupial out there in a hockey mask or hopped up on corn liquor, hell bent on ripping through all that lay between us and the infinite sky.
Since then, this animal has returned every night at around 12:30 in the morning and relentlessly scrapes and bangs for a couple of hours. Mark manages to sleep through the din, but I can’t. I slip out of bed and leave our bedroom. I walk past what was once our oldest daughter’s bedroom. It has long since become a music room, where Mark’s guitars, keyboard, computer, amplifiers, and tangled coils of cable have all but eradicated everything that once made the room Katie’s. A painted tree climbing the wall next to the window and the dim shapes of a few remaining glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, are all that remind us that the now distant woman was once a child, that once there was a bed in this room that held her.
I continue on to the next door, into the former room of our younger daughter. Signs of Layla are still in evidence: a hanging star-shaped lantern, a collection of toy horses congregated in a small corner of the bookshelf, a brittle blue plastic toiletry case, a framed collage of her roommates from her junior year abroad with a solemn vow below it to return in ten years’ time. Her bed is still there, a chipping white particle board frame with a tired mattress and oversized sheets that have lost her scent.
After three nights of this, I’ve decided to take action. I Google “pest control,” but that only brings up pages of listings for cockroach and termite exterminators. “Rodent removal” is more fruitful.
“Two beady eyes spy a small hole in the woodwork of your home.” So begins the Squirrel page on the United Wildlife Control’s website.
“Not too much later…that small hole in your home is now a big hole. Morning and night, in and out, in and out. Mrs. Squirrel is dragging in bark, leaves, dry grass, and part of your flower bed before adding it to what she’s already torn out of your house insulation, in preparation for the blessed event… Baby squirrels.”
Apparently there are a range of remedies available, beyond commercial repellents. Some people place little bowls of diced jalapeno peppers in the attic. Some invest in ultrasonic sound emitters. Some try to make their warm, dry ceilings more threatening by scattering cat fur and used kitty litter about, infusing the spaces with eau de cat piss.
But these efforts are futile, according to United Wildlife Control. “Safe capture and removal coupled with the repair of the hole the squirrel is using to access your home is the surest, most efficient means.” These authoritative words are accompanied by photos of a blue gloved hand holding a small cage containing a dazed squirrel and her small, bushy brood. In the background is a nearly bare tree, and the sky is a chilly gray.
How can I send them out into that? Surely their nest belongs indoors, in the now vacant, still-warm corners of our home, in spaces never meant to be empty.
River Mouse
Belong
1a: to be suitable, appropriate, or advantageous
b: to be in a proper situation
2a: to be the property of a person or b: to be attached or bound by birth, allegiance, or dependency
Our next door neighbor was on one of the planes that hit the South Tower on September 11. Our daughter had watched smoke rise from the Pentagon from her dorm window, then decided to leave Washington D.C. My father, after a series of excruciating vertebral fractures, had just been diagnosed with multiple myeloma. We’d been busy with horror, mourning, and moving, and by the second Sunday in October, the sudden absence of pressure had left me deflated and sad. It was a beautiful fall day, the foliage was at its peak, and I knew that the quiet, steady rhythm of paddling would do me good.
On the drive to the river, though, I heard a disturbing story on the car radio. Apparently in the last three or four days there had been a sudden and dramatic flare-up of solar storms, massive ejections of matter from the sun’s atmosphere. And according to the Space Environment Center, “These eruptions may herald the arrival of another volatile active center with the potential to impact various Earth systems.”
The potential to impact various Earth systems. The phrase evoked not just the standard range of apocalyptic images – meteorites colliding with Earth, nuclear winter, etc. – but something more visceral. I wondered how a solar storm would sound through a radio telescope if one could somehow turn up the volume. What was the aural trace of cold, dark, impersonal space, swarming with waves and frequencies and dangerous energy? It wasn’t just the unheard sound of it, but the inhuman chaos of it that frightened and unsettled me. I imagined the storms as a sensory assault like electronic feedback — loud, humming static-filed noise that frayed my nerves.
But the water and the warm red and golden trees lining the river bank pacified me. The only thing I could hear was the slurp of the paddle moving through the water.
After ten minutes of vigorous paddling, I paused to breathe deeply and look around me.
In that sudden silence, I heard scratching, and noticed some of the leaves that had drifted into the bow of the canoe moving, apparently of their own volition. Then I saw a mouse, scurrying in frantic circles under the front gunnel. It found cover under another damp leaf and stopped for the duration of a breath. But then the nose of the boat tapped a rock, and the tiny impact set the mouse off on another frenzied search for escape.
I navigated to the river bank. Then I placed the paddle’s broad tip in front of the now cowering mouse, hoping that it would climb aboard, so that I could lift it out of the boat and set it down on shore without having to touch it. But no luck. In an attempt to flee the paddle’s broad mouth, the terrified mouse furiously cycled its tiny feet, trying to climb the interior wall of the canoe. I tried to pick it up, but it skittered out from under my tentative fingers. I was afraid it would simply die of fear.
And so, absent any other choice, we accepted each other as companions as the current carried as past turning leaves and sodden bull rushes, past muscular roots coiling down and tree stumps twisting up out of the water. The canoe was the mouse’s world for those few hours, the river was mine, and both of us were adrift.
Moon
escape (v.)
c. 1300, transitive and intransitive, “free oneself from confinement; extricate oneself from trouble; get away safely by flight (from battle, an enemy, etc.),” from Old French; late 14c. as “avoid experiencing or suffering (something), avoid physical contact with; avoid (a consequence).” Formerly sometimes partly anglicized as outscape (c. 1500).
We’ve just returned from a late-winter vacation in Tankah Tres, Mexico. Last night we lay on the rooftop of the inn, huddled under oversized towels to shelter us from the surprisingly cool wind gusting in from the sea, and stared up at a blurry but still brilliant moon. It was encircled halfway down the sky by a huge silver halo, the likes of which I’d never seen. But my wonder at this shimmery, celestial circle was tinged with anxiety. Did it signal an impending hurricane? (“Haloes at night, mortals take flight”?) Had a massive volcano erupted somewhere, sending ash billowing up into the atmosphere and grounding all flights?
When we got back to our room, we went to Wikipedia, and learned that this lunar phenomenon is known as a “ring around the moon,” caused by “the refraction of Moonlight (which of course is reflected sunlight) from ice crystals in the upper atmosphere.” According to folk wisdom, a ring around the moon heralds the imminent arrival of bad weather.
It didn’t come, because here we are, safely back, in our own bedroom once again.
Every night as we lie in bed, cuddling or thinking or saying the hard things we avoid saying with the lights on, we look upward through the skylight — at jet contrails and geese and impossibly round, mean pellets of hail; at morning and night and the recurring gift of forgetting what lies between them.
Tonight all we see are the grayish white blots of melting snow above us – a witch, Mark says, see her big nose and dreadful mole? But I don’t, I see the yin and yang symbol, the melted and the un, the sweet dark and light of pandas and peace symbols and earth and sky. It is a skylight, yes, but it is also an overhead reflector, our broadcast imaginations, and tonight adrift in our canoe made of mattress and quilt, mine is at peace as I feel the warmth of the man next to me who murmurs now, Look, it’s Jupiter and all her moons.
Julie Wittes Schlack’s essay collection, This All-at-Onceness, was named one of Kirkus Review’s Best Independent Nonfiction Books of 2019. She is a former book reviewer for The Boston Globe and a regular contributor to Cognoscenti. Her essays and stories have appeared in numerous journals, including Shenandoah, The Writer’s Chronicle, Ninth Letter, and The Tampa Review. Julie earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University.