I live part-time with a senior. A very capable, strong-willed, kind, independent senior. She’s super mom and super grandma and she’s probably reading this right now and cursing me for talking about her. 😇

I stay with her because my jewelry shop and home office is here, among other reasons. The house we live in is the same house I grew up in since age 12.

The house is oldish but not old. It has many modern conveniences but nothing fancy. There are some weird spots, particularly in the crawl basement and furnace room, with holes that have been plugged.

That’s to prevent the rodents from entering the house when it gets cold outside.

We all know that rodents can make themselves very tiny, which is why somehow they still managed to get into the house at times. So my parents put up mouse traps and it was my dad’s job to empty those.

With him no longer with us, my mom takes care of the mice. I should probably take this over but at the moment she’s not complaining (too much).

At the back part of the house is a stone patio where I am currently sitting talk-texting into my phone and checking for typos.

Along the one house wall, below the big window, is a long row of bricks stacked three bricks tall.

At the front of the house there is a wooden plank along the path leading to the front door which has aged and weathered through the elements and exposed some large nails that are too difficult to extract. To prevent one of us from tripping over those nails sticking out I removed some of the bricks from the back wall and place them in front of the nails until we figure out how to fix it.

The bricks are gone from the front and are at the back wall again. Mom carried them back to their spot because it’s blocking a tiny hole where potentially the mice could enter the house.

“It needs all of those bricks there to keep them out,” she said.

I didn’t know that. 😶

Yesterday a chipmunk visited me when I sat on the back patio. He thought I might be snacking on a cookie but alas, there was no cookie.

I told my mom about the chipmunk and she wasn’t happy. “He digs up stuff and makes holes everywhere,” she complained.

Earlier today, I went outside onto the driveway and noticed the garage door was open. Mom was puttering in the front garden. We chatted a bit and then I saw my little friend the chipmunk run into the garage and hide underneath some stacked floorboards. The floorboards were raised on some bricks in order to prevent them getting wet when the car drips onto the garage floor during wet weather.

Chippy was down there underneath the tunnel hiding from us.

So I mentioned it to Mom and all hell broke loose. 😀

She tried to shoo him away and I took a broom to help. But Chippy had disappeared.

I went inside to warm up soup for lunch and mom went on the hunt for the trap.

Now you must understand that this is a very organized house. It’s cozy and comfortable, not anal and foreign; there’s no plastic on furniture or an atmosphere of ‘don’t come in here’. You can be comfortable and sit down but after we’re done in one room, we put our stuff back where it belongs and the place remains tidy. There’s no issue with constantly looking for stuff and wasting enormous amount of time.

Except, she couldn’t find the trap.

She looked in the garage and then came to the back and checked the shed. She may have gone to the crawl basement too, I don’t know, I was in the kitchen. But the trap was gone.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed the trap through the bathroom window upstair. I could see it situated in the front yard between the birches. I think she tried to catch the chipmunk before. I asked her if she checked the birches, maybe she left the trap there, but it wasn’t. She had moved it.

But to where?

I didn’t know where to look so I didn’t help. I sat in my chair on the patio spooning soup. Mom scanned the patio from behind me, looking toward me and suddenly noticed the trap on the little porch at the side door. It was ten feet away from me but in my line of vision.

Except…

I didn’t have my contacts in, nor my glasses on, so everything further than a two feet was blurry. I never saw it there, nor would I have looked there.

She took the trap to the front to set it up.

I asked her what she was going to do with Chippy when she catches him. She said she was going to release him someplace else.

“Where?” I asked. “Can we just release him behind the arena, near the creek?”

There’s a little park with a small forest and creek walking distance from the house where I sometimes take Tucker for a walk.

“No no no!” she exclaimed. “It has to be at least 3 km distance, or they come back!”

I didn’t believe it and made some comment which earned me a statistic from some article about some guy who had evidence that the wildlife find their way back if you don’t go far enough to release them..

So the plan is to drive Chippy, if we catch him, to the downtown library next to the river near the marina and release him there. That’s driving distance, past the fire station and near the quaint little downtown area where we may have to go treat ourselves to some gelato.🍦🍨

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to wash the dishes, check the mouse traps in the furnace room, and get back to work.

Update:

Chippy entered the trap, which looks like a long, narrow cage, and ate all the peanuts. Then he left. 😂

Seems the spring from the door broke which prevented the trap from trapping the sneaky little rodent. I missed all of this drama as I was in my room doing a tarot reading for a client but mom told me later. She said the door is now fixed.

Stay tuned… 🤠