Mouse-induced mayhem

Classes start Monday so naturally I've been occupied with essential last-minute matters, such as how to remove a potential mouse colony from a sofa. I don't know how many mice there are or how they got in there, but I know they've got to come out--and fast.

Some friends who were remodeling gave us the sofa more than a year ago, and it has been sitting in the garage ever since, awaiting the day when it could be taken upstairs to the emerging apartment. Then the first contractor disappeared, causing a long delay in the project, so the sofa sat there for more than a year wrapped carefully in tightly-sealed heavy yellow plastic, clean, dry, and protected from the elements--or so we thought.

Now the garage project is nearly done right down to the kitchen sink, which was installed this afternoon. It's fun to go over there every day and see what has appeared while we were out: today, windowsills and ceiling fans and a lovely built-in bookcase; tomorrow, the stove and medicine cabinet and who knows what else? In a few days we'll be able to start taking furniture up there and I'll be making curtains, which is why I slit open the protective plastic so I could compare a swatch of fabric with the sofa's upholstery.

There on the arm of the sofa I found a little pile of mouse droppings. Those pesky varmints! How did they get in through that heavy plastic? How much damage have they done? And how do we get them out? This is the question gnawing on my innards at night and hovering over my mind all day like a fog that comes in on little mouse feet--and, yes, impairing my ability to make metaphors work properly, as I realize when I try to envision a question that gnaws, hovers, fogs, and comes in on mouse feet. See what those pesky creatures do to me? By Monday they'll have reduced me to a quivering mass of mouse-obsessed mucus.

But that doesn't mean class is cancelled. The syllabus waits for no man--nor mouse either.