Poor Cherry Cherry :(

Cherry Cherry has been violated.

I am sickened.  Angry.  Disgusted.  Distraught.  A plethora of negative verbs!

(Cherry Cherry is my car, by the way.  She's the sweet little 2007 Toyota Corolla that carried me across the country with nary a flat tire or engine hiccup.  She's my girl.  So the fact that something bad has happened to her makes me feel awful.)

I first sensed trouble on Sunday.  When we packed up to leave the cabin, I saw shredded kleenex on the back seat floor.  That's where I keep the tissue box . . . and something small had definitely been clawing at it.

When Kevin came out, I gave him a big hug.

"If we die a fiery death on the way home, I want you to know that I love you," I said.  He pulled back and gave me a strange look.

"It appears a small creature has been inside my car," I explained, "and if, by chance, it's still in there and runs up my leg while I'm driving, there's a good chance I'll run off the road and into a billboard post or a bridge underpass or something."

"Did we leave a door open?" he asked.

"Well, I didn't," I replied, leaving the insinuation hanging between us.  He just rolled his eyes.

More than once, growing up on the farm, I heard the story about Grandma Sump putting on her overalls, going out to do chores, and making it halfway across the yard before feeling something crawling up the inside of her pants leg.  Living in the country with no one around has its perks, like when you suddenly rip your pants off outside the privacy of your own home.  We were taught at a young age to shake out our boots, pants, etc., before putting them on, just in case.  I wasn't sure trying to rip my pants off while driving could end well.

We made it home uneventfully, though, and I didn't think anything of it 'til I was out running errands the next day.  I came out of B.A. Burritos (my first visit -- definitely not as good as Chipotle, Qdoba, or Pancheros -- quite disappointing, actually, but that's another blog on another day) and saw something flutter across the passenger side floor.  At first I thought maybe a piece of gray paper was being blown by the wind, but leaning in for a closer look, I saw four legs and a tail.

Ughuhuhuhuh.

I kept calm.  I walked over to the passenger door, opened it up, and tried using a newspaper to shoo the little mouse out the door and back into nature.  Instead, the little bugger scurried up behind the dashboard.

Dang it!  Where was my killer instinct?!  I should have rolled up the paper and swatted the thing to death when I had the chance!

Now I wasn't so calm.  There was a mouse -- an alive, scampering mouse -- inside the car.  I had to drive the car to get anywhere other than the strip-mall parking lot, which I definitely couldn't just hang around in all day, waiting for the mouse to kindly take its leave.

I cringingly slid into Cherry Cherry and drove around the backside of the building to the grocery store parking lot, next stop on my list.  I envied the days when tight-rolled jeans were all the rage, because I was now seriously afraid that a mouse would crawl up my pant leg while I was driving, causing me to freak out, lose control of my car, and careen into one of the hundreds of other vehicles in this parking lot.

I parked without incident, jumped out of my car, and did what any girl would do.  I called my dad.

"Dad!  It's Tiffany!"  I said when he answered.  Long silence.

"What?"

"It's Tiffany!" I shouted.  I understand why he was confused.  He rarely uses his cell phone, and the only people who call him on it are people he works with out at the farm.  I skipped the small talk and cut to the chase.

"Dad, I need help!  There's a mouse in my car!"  He chuckled.

"Have you seen it?"

"Yeah, I saw it!  I tried to shoo it out but it ran up behind the dashboard."

"Oh, no."

"And it shredded a bunch of Kleenex in the back," I continued.

"Sounds like it's building a nest.  Probably a mama about to have babies."

My heebie-jeebie factor skyrocketed.  A whole family of mice taking up residence in my beloved Cherry Cherry??

"What do I do?  If I put out rat poison, won't it die somewhere in my car and stink the whole thing up?"

"Well," my dad calmly said, "I think you'll want to use glue traps so you can throw them out once you catch them."

My dad's a freakin' genius!

Without further ado, I went inside to get my groceries and my mouse traps.  Unfortunately, they didn't have mousetraps in the grocery store.  Also unfortunately, it had started raining pretty hard while I was buying food, and because I'd pretty much catapulted myself out of my car once I parked it, I wandered around the lot for a while trying to find my poor mouse-infested Cherry Cherry, getting soaked but also rather dreading getting inside once I found it.

There's a K-Mart right across the street from the grocery store, but the two minutes it took to get there seemed like forever, wondering when the mouse was going to crawl up my pant leg.  If it weren't pouring rain, I probably would have walked over to save myself the freak out. 

The store had a fine selection of mouse traps, including two- and four-packs of glue traps.  I went for the four, just in case there was an entire mouse colony settling in for the winter.  You never know.

Taken at a stoplight . . . 

I ran through the rain back out to the car and ripped open the box.  I put two on the passenger-side floor, where I'd seen the pesky invader, and one under each seat.  Then, in preparation for what would be the longest fifteen-minute ride home of my life, I pulled my pant legs up over my knees.  The thought of careening off the bridge and into the Mississippi River after a mouse crawled up my pants seemed like a very real possibility.  I wasn't taking any chances.

I made it home without trauma and sent Kevin to check the traps when he got home from work a few hours later.

"If there's something trapped but it's still alive, kill it.  That's the humane thing to do,"  I said.  I was a lot more sensitive to the feelings of the mouse when I was nowhere near it.

Pretty soon there was a tap on the window.  I could see Kevin holding something up in the semi-darkness, but I didn't look.  I was cooking dinner, and I have a very sensitive gag reflex.

"Two!" he announced.  Shiver.  Gross.

This morning?  Another freaking mouse in another glue trap.  And Kevin had already gone to work, so I had to get rid of it myself. 

Next time we're taking his car to the cabin.