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Life lessons from the furry mouse in my apartment
By adriana_acosta in To venus and back
June 22, 2011

I am a firm believer that the powers that be likes to place different obstacles in our lives. Some to make us stronger, others to question what we are doing in life. And one of those obstacles was placed forth on Sunday afternoon.

I usually spend Sunday afternoon sitting on my couch, flipping through newspapers and drinking coffee. Or sometimes I like to spend Sunday afternoon watching endless hours of television in my favorite pajamas and eating Chinese food. So this Sunday I sat on my couch, enjoying the day when something caught my eye. I looked up and omigosh, it was a mouse staring right at me from the hallway.

Now I know I may be exaggerating here because well, I am terribly, horribly, deathly afraid of creatures that shouldn’t really be inside an apartment. But it felt like one of those horror movies where the screen shot zooms out, and the characters are making eye contact.

Now that I look back, that mouse was super small and kind of adorable. But at that time, I thought it was the scariest thing. I quickly got up from my couch, grabbed my broom and tried to push it away. Yeah I know, I was in a panic and wasn’t really thinking. My plan was to somehow bring it away from my bedroom, pass the living room and pass the main door of my apartment to the wild, where it belonged.

But alas, that plan didn’t work. So I hurried to the bedroom door, shut it and ran back to the living room in fear it would jump on me. But instead it turned back and started going toward the bathroom and hurried under the door. The only thought on my mind was that I would have to go sleep somewhere else that was not my apartment. Perhaps I can spend the night in my car? How about sleeping at the office? It was going to be nowhere inside this apartment.

In situations like these, I would call my dad. But he was five hours away. Who to call I thought? I decided to call my friend Patrick; you may remember him from a previous column I wrote a few months back. When my iPhone died, he was the one who helped me bring it back to life. He also said it was OK to include him in this column if I plugged the radio station – listen to Happy Radio 92.5 FM. Also make sure to listen to me every Thursday after the 8 a.m. news!

A few minutes later he showed up to my apartment with a container in hand. I am sure he had some big plan to safely remove the mouse from my apartment, but I just didn’t see it at the time. When he walked into my bathroom the mouse was gone. “Are you sure the mouse is here?” he asked. “Yes, it was gray and small and had a long, long tail,” I said in a frantic voice.

We decided to get some sticky pads so the mouse could walk up to them, eat the peanut butter that we had planned to place and then safely take it outside.

After he placed the sticky pad inside the bathroom, I thought about all the time we would have to wait before the mouse would decide to eat the peanut butter. I thought about all the nights I would be sleeping in my car or at work, because there was no way I would be sleeping inside my apartment. When I moved to Bay City, some people called me a city girl. “How can you tell?” I would ask. “You just know,” they would say.

I guess I have proved them all right because last year during rodeo time I went to a heifer clinic, I couldn’t even pet one for fear it would attack me. I was even told they smelled fear, I don’t know if he just said that to scare me more or if it was really true.

At the carnival, I couldn’t even pet a chicken and this Friday when I went to see the Matagorda County Champion Riders I screamed when a horse tried to sniff my hair.

And now this, a tiny, furry creature who was probably more frightened than me. And all it took was less than 10 minutes to get the mouse out of my apartment.

I guess that’s the thing about life. We fear the unknown, we fear change in life. Something unexpected, something that we don’t usually want in our lives, ends up being part of the equation. Now you either have to decide, do you accept the change or do you move on? In this case, the mouse lost; at least I tried to face my fear of our four-legged creature’s right?

Wherever the mouse is, I hope it’s in a happy place roaming around another place that’s not my apartment.

A big thanks to Patrick for helping me with the mouse! Have you learned any life lessons lately? email me: aacosta@vicad.com