Trap

This morning, I set my lunch box on the passenger seat of my venerable Toyota light pickup, slipped my car-mug of miso into the cup holder, depressed the clutch, and turned over the engine. A couple seconds later, the vent fans spun up and produced a sound akin to an On The Edge card riffling against a bicycle spoke. Now, my truck is a '93 and has plenty of rattles and grinds, but that was a new sound. So I twisted the key and she rumbled to stillness. Then I heard a rustle. I leaned over and slapped the dash over the glovebox twice. More rustling. Slapped again. Silence. Slapped some more. More rustling.

I actually allow mice to live in my garage, because hey, it's not very nice to kill living beings. If they were in the house, then I would consider them a health threat and would reluctantly eradicate them. In the garage, they occasionally chew up a glove or an extension cord, yet remain primarily harmless. I let them be. But I can't very well drive to work with one perilously near a vent fan; if it died I would feel kinda bad and it would cause that yucky death stench. I took the car instead.

Now I suppose the mice have become enough of a nuisance to bother trapping the poor creatures, but I'm gonna try to trap them live and incarcerate them. The tiny crimes they have heaped upon me over the last several years still fall well shy of the death penalty. And besides, they're just so cute. You know, same reason I can't kill Sailor Scouts.