Ah, the pleasures of country life. So far we’ve seen a deer, a fox, a groundhog, and a hawk in our backyard, all from the cozy confines of our dining room.
Each sighting elicits a squeal of delight, but the hawk especially caught my fancy. I’m in awe of these fierce birds. It swooped down onto a low tree branch, and I stopped for a few minutes to watch it. After some side stepping, it turned around on the branch, and I realized it had prey. A small grey patch: a mouse. I watched delighted as little bits and puffs floated down from the branch as the hawk tore into it.
Hopelessly, I was wishing it were the mouse in my bedroom wall. The mouse that wakes me up every night. Scratching something out of sight, but close, very close, to my head. The disturbing little sounds amplified by the silence in the house and beyond at 3am.
It was a sleepless week. After all, how do you go back to sleep when there is a rodent lurking near you, even if you can’t see it?
Rodents are one of my cliched fears. While I love seeing a deer or fox in the yard, I still must consciously quell my jumpiness whenever I see a squirrel or chipmunk. Twenty years of living in the city, I just don’t like to see any small thing scurrying out of the corner of my eye. Rat sightings, just the possibility of a sighting, make me shudder.
And yet here I am, removed from the threat of my beloved city’s underground residents, but plagued by its cousins’ antics. Trading one fear for another. One set of pros and cons with another. It doesn’t matter where you are, you carry the same fears. There’s no escaping the anxieties that plague you, the dark corners of your mind.
The twisted thoughts as I try to fall back to sleep: anxiety about what could happen if I do get together with family or friends indoors. The anxiety of not getting together, of not seeing family. The fear that someone will get so sick and have to go to the hospital and I won’t ever see them again. The idea that I could be responsible for getting a family member sick. The fear that Parker could be one of the rare children to get really sick from Covid. The fear that I will get Covid and my heart and lungs will prove to be so much weaker than I ever knew. I had a dream that I was explaining a diagram of drowning to my mother, and woke up terrified that she will get Covid and ‘drown’ to her death.
There is no end in sight. I have set traps in our crawl spaces and now when I hear the mouse, my ear is tuned to see if it’s possibly the snapping of a trap. So far, it hasn’t happened. I suspect the mice know to avoid them and that traps are a waste of money. I fear how bad Covid is going to get in the coming weeks and months. It’s the same acute listening and waiting, holding my breath, hoping to hear what I want, knowing it’s likely not going to happen. I have to find a way to steel my nerves, to put my fears in context, to do what I can to sleep through the night.