Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
The Daily Cardinal Est. 1892
Sunday, October 05, 2025

A kitchen with mice is not twice as nice

Last year, my roommates and I celebrated the onset of fall with a migration of small critters into our apartment. Dan spotted them first. 

 

Look there!"" He gestured toward an almost imperceptible blur darting into the space behind the refrigerator. 

 

""Is it a mouse?"" I said. 

 

""It definitely looked weirder than a mouse,"" Dan said. ""Almost like a lizard or something."" 

 

I imagined elaborated scenarios for how and why lizards (chameleons, maybe!) would've come to inhabit our particular flat in the upper Midwest. The most likely draw seemed to be the sorry state of our kitchen, but it was still flattering to play host to such exotic guests, like visiting foreign dignitaries of the animal kingdom. 

 

What did they eat? Could they be domesticated? My curiosity bred enthusiasm over several days, to the point that it was disappointment, not disgust, I felt one day when I moved aside a stack of dirty dishes and discovered a scattering of tiny, round mouse turds on the kitchen counter. 

 

Enjoy what you're reading? Get content from The Daily Cardinal delivered to your inbox

Though unpleasant, the appearance of mouse feces in our apartment was not entirely surprising. Our flat is part of what used to be a boarding house that was built around a century ago. A lot of people talk about the charm of historic homes, but few real estate agents mention that if you live in a house that is 100 years old, dozens of generations (whole societies, really) of creeping things have been hard at work, building empires in the tangled passages inside your walls, like a Vietcong tunnel network. 

 

The presence of who-knows-how-many mice cast a suspicious, unnerving light on many features of the apartment that I used to find appealingly old-fashioned. Were they lurking in the crawlspace, waiting for me behind the ancient baseboards or staging an ambush from the dark recesses of the fireplace? I moved around the flat with caution, wondering when Charley would get the drop on us. 

 

Dan and I didn't relish catching them ourselves and, when pressed, our third roommate, Joe, had difficulty articulating his plan for peaceful cohabitation. Eventually, the landlord was called, traps were set and we spent late September searching the apartment for dead mice, which, in calendar dates and prevailing mood, is about as far from an Easter Egg hunt as one can get. 

 

I've heard the expression, ""This is going to get worse before it gets better"" used dozens of times in movies, but I've never seen it illustrated more clearly than finding a small pile of rodent shit on the countertop one day, and then coming home the next to find a mouse with its neck snapped in a trap, lying in the same spot. 

 

It wasn't like seeing a dead pet. This was just a stranger, really. But though I hadn't actually killed it directly, I still felt a twinge of guilt for having ordained this animal's violent death. 

 

The mouse's dead, wide-open eyes stared accusingly. ""Is your house so small that you couldn't share it with my family?"" it seemed to ask in its little Fievel voice. 

 

I felt a need to exonerate myself or testify to my love of animals. I started to explain how much my family loved our cats, thought better of it, and had decided to show the mouse a picture of the manatee I had adopted when I realized there wasn't anything I could do to mend relations with this creature. Wrapping it in a plastic bag, I cradled its tiny body, carrying it outside and dropping it into the garbage; there to rest among the food scraps he had loved so much in life. 

 

Out in the chilly autumn night, I stood silently by the plastic garbage bins for a moment, brushed away a tear and went back inside to face the centipedes. 

 

Have a perfect mouse epitaph? Send it to Matt at hunziker@wisc.edu.

Support your local paper
Donate Today
The Daily Cardinal has been covering the University and Madison community since 1892. Please consider giving today.

Powered by SNworks Solutions by The State News
All Content © 2025 The Daily Cardinal