Okay so tonight before I build anymore fancy rat trap contraptions I decided to try to channel my grandmother "Memaw".
This was before she came to live with us permanently after my Aunt Nettie died if a broken heart.
When I was little, whenever we'd get a mouse in the house, my grandmother would arrive, like Mary Poppins.
She'd be staying for a week. She'd also cook dinner the whole time she was there.
She'd show those mice the what-for, because my parents didn't have it in them. My dad was a softy and my mom was squeamish.
Not Memaw. She was a
badass-ninja-mouse-warrior in the guise of a sweet old lady with horrible arthritis.
She did not come from the less is more camp, it was full on war.
The procession to the basement went like this.
First my dad.
He would be carrying a wooden kitchen chair and a folding metal TV tray. (Anyone here remember those?)
Then Memaw.
She'd walk down the basement stairs one at a time, gripping the railing with one hand, cane in the other.
Then one of us kids would bring up the rear carrying her shoebox of supplies.
In the shoebox was a dinner knife that somehow found itself in her purse one day at lunch at a local department store called Hutzler Brothers.
I know this because its engraved Hutzler Bros. on the handle and I have it in my kitchen drawer.
Also in the box was a bar of ivory soap,
a babyfood jar half filled with flour
and at least twenty old-school wooden mousetraps.
She sit in the chair with the TV tray in front of her and patiently cut bits of soap (her bait) with the knife, and sets the traps.
She'd pass it to my dad who would carry it over to the bottom step. So many times he'd get almost there and set the trap off by accident.
The LORD was called to attention by ALL the names he/she goes by, sometimes by my dad, sometimes by my grandmother!
They moved like two members of a bomb squad.
The object was to line the tread of the first step end to end with traps. The last few my dad would put in place after the rest of us had started back up the stairs.
This procedure took quite some time as you can probably imagine!
When we were nearly done my dad would help Memaw up, carry the chair over right next to the steps, and she'd sit down again.
She'd rub her hands with the dry bar of soap then she'd lean sideways out of the chair and with her bent old fingers she'd dip repeatedly into the jar of flour and sprinkle it "sparingly" all over the traps.
Now I have no idea what was with the soap or the flour, I'm just telling you the story of how I remember it.
With family things-sometimes there's a reason but sometimes there's NO reason and you just do things like your ancestors JUST BECAUSE!
Sometimes we'd barely turned off the light and latched the basement door before we'd start hearing: SNAP! SNAP-SNAP! But she'd never let us "go see".
I realize now she didn't want us kids to see a poor little mousey writhing in agony.
She made us wait until morning and then we'd run to go look. We'd always have a bunch of surprised looking stiff-as-a-board mice waiting for us.
We would use a paint stirring stick to set off any inspiring traps then load the others into a grocery bag from the A&P and bring them up to her. While we were at school she'd dispose of the carcasses, wash the traps and sit them on the back porch to dry.
After dinner we'd start all over again. Usually after 2 or 3 nights we wouldn't catch anymore.
I still used peanut butter, and the traps are plastic instead of wood, and darnit, I forgot the ivory soap, but let's just say I put down more than a few of those traps and I sprinkled them ALL sparingly with flour.
I'm not checking any more tonight, but by sundown I'd already caught 2. A big male and a young male.
Thank God they both looked just as surprised as I remember the mice in my childhood basement looking,
which is good because I'm not at all squeamish like my mom, but I really am a softy like my dad.
