“Jerry, you’ll need to bring the traps up again.”
We had driven to our home here in beautiful Crestline on Wednesday morning so that I could wrap gifts, and make other Christmas preparations, assuring that when we come here from Havasu on the 23rd, there will be some semblance of order to our festivities. There’s still a small amount of snow on the ground from the last storm, and the temperatures have been low, so there is freezing every night. Our house is well insulated, and remains at a snug 50 degrees when its locked up and we’re gone, and we’ve come to understand that combination is quite appealing to the mice who vacation here in the San Bernardino mountains.
We’ve known for some time that the mice around here are brilliant, for our skirmishes with them before have quite proved that. Now it seems we are hosting a tribe of epicurean gourmands, for they have taken to nibbling (and no doubt brewing somewhere) expensive coffee beans. On checking our cupboards Wednesday, I found indications of their presence on one shelf only. Residing on that shelf are mostly canned goods, but as we prepared to leave after Thanksgiving a few weeks ago, I had also placed there a sealed plastic bag of gourmet coffee beans. Now I could see that into the slick coffee bag, two tiny holes had been drilled, presumably by mouse teeth, and that there were coffee beans scattered around on my cupboard shelves. Unbelievable. I know the little rascals probably live down in the basement around the water heater, and just come prowling upstairs when their provisions run low, but I had never thought of them brewing cups of coffee. They probably utilize miniature coffee pots and cups the size of my pinky fingernail when a caffeine urge strikes the little brown mice, and they’re probably snickering down there now at their successes in evading Jerry’s traps.
One of them isn’t. Jerry snagged him with white cream cheese on a trap setting smack among the coffee beans.
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My devotional blog is here.
Shirley Buxton 