Driven to murder

I’m not especially proud of myself today.
     I’ve become a killer – though many would consider it justifiable homicide.
     It’s the mice.
     For the 15 years Rick and I have been in this house, we’ve had company. We’d hear them in the walls at night, or find occasional droppings in the cabinet under the sink, but the mice have always seemed – what word to use? – benign, or symbiotic, like the unpleasant next-door neighbors you just have to put up with because you might want to borrow their hedge clippers some day.
     For years, we used little “mouse cubes” to trap them live and return them outdoors, where, no doubt, they promptly rerouted and came back in the very holes they had originally gnawed. We even took to naming them for a while, and recording their numbers in those little penciled notches where you make four strikes and run the fifth through the column. I’m embarrassed to say how many we recorded, but it surpassed two digits.
     Once, we found a mother mouse and three or four newborns in one of the mouse cubes and we felt so bad we kept them in a box in the bathtub for a while before we took them into the woods across the street, hoping they’d survive.
     Ah, but that was then.
     Now, it’s war. They’ve become so brazen they’ve broken into our precious camping gear to make nests out of our Campmor pillows. They’ve chewed the ends off paper towel rolls. I swear they’ve thumbed their noses at our cat. And – the final straw – they have climbed up on the kitchen counter to help themselves to a bowl of fresh fruit.
     Enough. This week, we had a exterminator come and set mouse bait throughout the house. Two or three weeks, he said, and they’ll be gone, though the “treatment” will continue for a year.
     As I said, I’m not proud of it. I’ve never done anything like this in my life. But it feels like it’s us or them.
     And until they start paying part of the mortgage – or show up with hedge clippers to lend – I’m voting for us.