Every house I have ever lived in has had woods bordering the property somewhere. Which means every house I've ever lived in has had mice, sometimes in the kitchen pantry or the attic and we only ever see the droppings, other times they've run across the kitchen floor or the extra twin bed. From time to time, I've heard noises coming from the attic that sound too big to be a mouse. In Pennsylvania, people mentioned racoon or bat for those bigger-than-mouse noises in the attic. Here, in Massachusetts, people seem to think squirrels first off.

Whatever the interloper, I'm never happy to hear noises of any kind over my head because I am the exterminator in my house. My husband is so squeamish around snakes and rodents, one can only guess in another life, he died in a snake-pit or a rat-infested prison cell, or maybe endured sessions in both. So when lying in my bed one quiet night this spring, I heard scratching in the attic overhead of such volume as to bring to mind something along the lines of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion, my heart just sank. I love animals. I hate killing anything. And I know how to deal with mice, even though I hate it. But anything bigger? Out of my experience, and even further out of my comfort zone. Yet, creatures hanging around in the attic, chewing who knows what and pooping wherever, creating a general health and safety issue? Has to be stopped.

Call the exterminator you think? Uh-uh. I am a do-it-yourselfer. For lots of reason, budget being only one consideration. Non-chemical is another consideration. And I often find that my motivation is so high, and my perfectionist streak is so deep, that only I stay glued to the task to the point where I will actually be satisfied with the result. [Yup, Rodney D., It's not easy bein' me.]

My first step with a potential uninvited attic visitor is to wait. If the noise goes away in a couple nights, and I don't hear it for weeks, I give myself a pass. It has left, I tell myself. Out of hearing, out of mind. After this one night of loud noises, we were clear for much of the spring. At our writers' gathering, someone brought up the racoon incident when one of our members had a mother racoon and babies in her beach house attic. Much to my delight, this woman announced this time around that the attics are too hot for creatures in the summer. They leave. Yahoo, I thought, relaxing. I can put off investigating our attic entries and guests for another couple months anyhow.

Much to my dismay, I can now attest that this axiom is false. Two weeks ago I heard VERY loud scratching again, and knew this time, I was on to step two—traps. I researched squirrel traps, since this noise couldn't be mice, but once I discovered the magnitude of the traps for something that size, and the subsequent need to remove and release? or bury? I decided I'd start small anyhow and see if there were any mice, or at least mice.

So I set four mouse traps and dreamed of a mouse (female) that was my pet that night. The next morning, I had to dispose of the two mice I found dead in the traps. I wished once more that my husband wasn't so freaked out about mice because I think my response is worse—it HURTS me to kill them. One was flipped over. I didn't look directly at it, just picked it up with my salad tongs and dropped it in a dark plastic bag. The other dead one's little dark eyes were open and when I flashed the flashlight on it, they looked back at me, not unlike how our sweet labrador retriever mix looks at me. AWFUL. I have since caught two more. And I am now putting off the inevitable, setting four more traps.

In my circles around the attic, I have also discovered wasps' nests up there. Small and dormant at the moment, I think, but it appears I have a veritable wildlife sanctuary developing on the top floor. Birds are nesting in the eaves in front, and their nest dirt and bird poop is dripping down around the Palladian window over my front door. And when I pull my attention away from the upstairs fauna, I can find ants trafficing my kitchen and flies multiplying as if our house just touched down in the middle of a fairy tale—every time I kill one, two more spring forth. (Someone must have left the screen door open for the dog for hours, but really, how fast can flies multiply? In minutes?)

Ah, sunny, verdant, hot, humid, fertile summer. I love animals and nature, and I love living on a woods, but my natural colleagues are encroaching more than I care for at the moment!

 (How I wish this was the only type of mouse in my house...)