Dear John

Oh no, you won’t be pleased to hear we’ve got mice again.

We had them occasionally, every few years, and it always dragged us down so much.

I’ve been doing the thing about putting poison down in a neat pile, to see if it gets disturbed.  The last few nights it’s been disturbed every time, so I am not in the house alone!  But when I try putting the poison on sticky traps there’s no success.  They’re obviously too clever to fall for that.

Do you remember the time there were two trapped in the front room for ages?  How we had sticky traps across the door but couldn’t trap them whatever we did, and we had to abandon the room, until at last we did get them by putting poison down in the middle of a square of four traps.

Do you remember an earlier time, when there were little baby ones?  There was one crawling up the curtain on the front door once, and one which you killed with a broom as it ran along the corridor.

I always remember how we both felt so sorry for it afterwards – because it was an innocent creature after all, and so tiny and cute.  And yet we were united in that we had to win the war against them, and so a successful mouse termination was a good thing.

I’m still depressed and annoyed by it as a problem, but it’s such a small thing, now that I’m suffering this bigger, all encompassing horror of loss and grief.