I read a NYT review for Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional this week. I read the book last year and found it to be raw and harsh; stripped bare, like a drought or the landscape of the Monaro, and like so much of her writing.
If you click on the review you’ll see the headline image to be a woman weeding the garden with mice all around.
The mice are everywhere. Rooting through the chicken feed and the lettuce bed and the compost bucket; running up bedposts and bare legs; spewing from cars and church organs; waves of small bodies scurrying across paved roads like “a wide river of silver water.” Where there aren’t mice, there are their effects: electrical cords and bags of flour torn apart; magpies dead after eating the poisoned carcasses; a nest inside an old piano, woven from pieces of felt chewed off its hammers. The sounds of their scratching in the walls “like dried leaves falling.”
Hard relate here right now.
Yesterday I opened the drawer next to the stove and grabbed a freezer bag, into it I loaded our food. Before I reached the freezer, the stench seeped upwards. Mouse. I looked again and saw every freezer bag knawed to pieces and the snaplock bags pushed and pulled to the back of the drawer. A fortress of the rodent. I dug further and then, pulled away with a domestic housewife scream (I hate that reflex). There was a bag, that was a home to a nest of more than 10 babies, eyes still closed.
What do you do?
They went outside. I chucked them as far as I could behind the garage and was furious at the situation.
A week earlier I pulled another plastic bag (shopping bag this time) from another spot in the kitchen (under the sink) and I yelped again. A mouse scuttled away and then tried to climb back in. There had to be more. Outside we went and more than 10 baby mice, eyes open this time, scurried across the lawn. My daughter wanted to catch one and keep it in a plastic container. Of course, I helped her try.
Not to be deterred, I got to the job of the mouse traps. Again.
When I opened the ‘bits and pieces’ drawer there was a mouse in the trap and it’s fat friend ran for its life. In the bedroom, I set another trap and no more than 10 seconds later, it went off. WTF.
So I’ve been researching.
People. We do not have a mouse plague in our midst. Except for one household in southern NSW.
To me, it seems endless, no sooner have I got rid of them all, than it’s nesting time again and I can hear them scratching away, sending me into yet another spin, as they seep further and further into my psyche. Gross.
Like a bad argument, they make me furious, it’s a battle I cannot win (our house is old, with lots of gaps and holes and dark crevices - we are up against it). So what to do? I don’t know - all I can think is to write of it here. Please surprise me with your similar encounters, advice of total eradication and if nothing else, condolences for having so many free loaders in one house.
Some new things are coming this year. This newsletter isn’t going to lose anything but there may be some new additions. There may also be changes to the days we post sooooo ……..
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Podcast playlist
There’s two things I have been seeing everywhere in the last few weeks (apart from mice!) The Telepathy Tapes and Unreasonable Hospitality.
Telepathy Tapes: A mind-blowing investigation into the astounding ability of non-verbal, mostly autistic children to read people’s mind. It’s so brilliant.
Unreasonable Hospitality: I do not have a copy but I’m on the bandwagon, I’ve watched the TED talk, subscribed to the newsletter and read the reviews. Will Guidara, I really like the sounds of this.
How Tim Minchin brings Wit, Wisdom and Humanity to the Arts. I loved reading TM’s book over the summer holidays, it will be a beside book for me forevermore and this pod is a beautiful way to back up what he says in that book.
Lay your eyes on these Instagram accounts
@antheapolsonart (pictured above) || @ainsleydurose || @the_deni_dictionary
This pile of things to read
35 health tips by healthy people. Loved this esp the dark cho coated almonds - the most healthy non guilty treat ever invented.
Sally Sara chats with one of Agriculture’s most powerful women: Su McClusky ( a yass local) as part of RN’s Changing Australia Series. “I have an new appreciation for soft diplomacy”. I’m putting my bid in to get her as a guest on Company.
Joan Didon’s Book: Note to John via NTY
A gorgeous Graziher story on a mobile sauna (build on the back of a truck) that does the rounds of special places in Tasmania.
Hi, I'm in high country Victoria. No mice to report at this point, but here to let you know I grew up in the wheat farming belt of the Mallee in the 1980s where a mass mouse plague was in full swing. Stone Yard Devotional took me back there. You would pick up a sheet of corrugated tin and hundreds of them would run. Small boys in my classes did unspeakable things to them. the legs of our beds stood in buckets of water, and my mother set bucket/drowning traps in the house each night and there would be dozens of drowned mice for her to dispose of every morning. Charlotte Wood captured it well. I hope they are temporary at your place.
I'm down in Hobart, Tasmania and we have been in the midst of a rat plague too. Neighbours popping over for tea and to swap notes on how to get rid of them! I wonder of its the warm weather, but it does seem much worse this year. Good luck!