Sarah Ryan, Rodent Killer Extraordinaire

We hadn’t lived in our house for three weeks, and one night, Sarah went into her room to grab her candle.  We were going to sleep for the night, and she wanted a little light in her room, obviously.  Armed with only her flashlight, she walked to her room and immediately returned to our living room.  The look on her face said it all – she needed backup. 

Walking into her room, she explained the situation.  “I just saw a cockroach run behind my bed.”  (Young and naïve, we thought it was just a cockroach.)  At this time, we did not have bed frames, and our mattresses were just on the floor.  We quickly lit all the lights we could find – candles, lanterns, and the flashlights on our phones.  On the count of three, she lifted up her bed and I shone the light near the bed, trying to see what it was.  Sure enough, it was a mouse.  Great. 

In that moment, we made a decision.  The mouse had to die.  Shutting the door, we locked ourselves inside; no mice would emerge from this battle.  We quickly piled up everything on the floor to give it the least amount of chances to hide.  (At this point, we did not have our shelves, and we were living rather haphazardly out of duffel bags and suitcases.) 

Thus commenced us chasing this mouse around the room.  Sarah and I both picked up one of her tennis shoes and started throwing them where we thought the mouse was.  Our hope was to corner it, but the little guy was too fast.  For twenty minutes, we kicked all of her stuff around the floor of her room, jumping out of the way any time we thought the mouse was coming at us.  (We obviously had high hopes of killing the thing.) 

The kicker, though, came near the end when Sarah accidentally kicked her deodorant and it hit me on the foot.  I freaked out, thinking it was the mouse running over my foot or something.  (To be honest, I have no idea why I thought the mouse would run right at me.  Panic took over all of my common sense for those thirty minutes or so.)  This incident did it, though.  We knew it was time for this rat to meet its maker. 

We trapped it in the corner of her room, and in a moment of clarity, Sarah closed her eyes and took a well-aimed swing.  We looked down, and there he was.  A tiny mouse, still twitching from the hit.  We found a bucket, swept it inside, and quickly ran it outside to chunk it.  From that point on, we could not pray for our shelves to come any sooner.  At least if our stuff isn’t in a pile on the floor, the mouse has no place to nest that we can’t see easily. 

Since then, we have had our share of incidences with mice, but we have quickly changed our plan of attack.  We do not have the time or the effort to trap each mouse in our room and kill it with a tennis shoe.  Instead, we tend to simply open the door to our room, watch it leave, and then shut the door and go to sleep.  It’s not a perfect scenario, by any means, but in time, we’ll have a cat, and then our situation will be much better :) 

And besides, we now have a pretty awesome mouse story.  Who says we’re just foolish white women living in Liberia?

A side note from Sarah:  The moment she kicked the deodorant and it hit my foot, my face had an expression of sheer terror.  I jumped and screamed so loudly…all because of this stupid deodorant.  “At that point,” she says, “I knew everything was going to be okay for the next two years.”