Tonight I almost caught a mouse in my bare hands. I was reading upstairs and heard a very tiny sound down below on the first floor. I waited with my shoes off on the stairs for nearly half an hour to hear his sounds again, and stalked carefully across the kitchen floor for nearly another half hour. Then I sprang to the pot drawer beneath the stove, where I thought I presumed him to be, and pulled it open with such a movement that it should have stunned him.

Instead I found he was under the refrigerator quite beside himself. When I shined a flashlight on him he ran and I nearly crushed him behind the trash bin, but he escaped through a tiny hole next to the dishwasher hose.

As I set a few traps and placed them in appropriate locations, I became aware that not many homeowners these days would be so attuned to the rhythms and sounds of their house that the silent movements of a mouse would be so clearly discernible to them - even one story above them!

Yet this has happened to me repeatedly. I don’t relish stalking mice but over the years I have learned from this house the utter importance of listening to small sounds and tracking their source down. Frequently they are the source of potential problems or the result of some small failure soon to become a BIG trouble-maker.

The mouse is history, but the sense of oneness I have with this house, illustrated by the incident of the mouse, is very special indeed. In this house I have caught mice in paper bags, traps, with poison and even behind the trash bin. We don’t have but 1 or 2 per winter, but each time I hear them, sense them, before I know for certain they are there. The trap, this disposal of the corpse and the silence that follows are merely emblems of a symbiotic relationship which I have with this house. I feel its needs, sense it deeply, like an old couple or a man with his prized hunting dog. There is a sense of magic about it which never ceases to amaze me.