Maddenation
Mice in the Attic
Over the weekend, I went through some of the stuff that Dad and Mom have brought me from their attic. It’s mostly old papers from school that I saved thinking, perhaps, that I’d need to brush up on Wuthering Heights some day and might want to check my notes from Ms. Sullivan’s class. (No, really, I guess they do bring back some memories, and some of my doodles are pretty entertaining, but why in the world would I really want to save all this junk?) Anyway, a couple of the boxes have mouse turds all over the place (I already threw away a whole box of my old gray tube socks because they were eaten through and pooped on). So I’m thinking: How do mice get up into the attic anyway? Do they get inside the walls of the house from the outside and then climb up on the frame? And if so, where’s their entry point? Why can’t we find it? Have we even looked? Do they get inside some time when someone leaves a door open and then climb us the stairs and then wait for an opportunity when someone leaves the attic stairs open? Really. I mean, how do they do that? We usually start our meditation from the point where they’re already there, and it’s like a given: oh yeah, mice in the attic. But it’s not like they’re spiders or flying insects or something. Can they climb up the outside of the house and then get in that fan vent thing? And once they’re there, can they survive just eating socks? Or do they eat bugs? And isn’t it kind of cool that there can be this whole ecosystem in our attic going on without our really noticing? I mean, how often have we seen a mouse in the house? And where do they go when we’re moving the boxes around and finding their poop? So many questions!
Patrick • Questions • 04/19/04 • 3 comments
Comments
David • 04/25/04 • 9:37 AM:Very good questions indeed. Add this one to the mix - Why did you still have a whole box of gray tube socks? I hear a piece on NPR about people who are packaholics. I forget the real name. But apparently people can have a condition/disease where they keep EVERYTHING. This is kinda like some of our family friends, the Schmeils and the Schmokes (the names have been changed to protect the innocent - are they innocent?). I just tried finding the story on npr.org, but couldn’t. Basically it was about the New York housing people going around and counseling people with packrat syndrome (I made that up). There were people who had every newspaper still in there apartment from like 1966. The housing people care because landlords go nuts over it and it’s a mighty big fire hazard and they’re always finding these type of people dead long after they’ve died and stuff like that.
Related to what Pat wrote, I too have wondered what those rodents eat in ecosystems like attics. Perhaps research in this area needs to be done. Also, are you sure it’s mouse poop?
Also, now it makes it easier to understand earlier people’s beliefs that life could spontaneously generate (abiogenesis) - like such recipes as - leave meat out on the counter for a few days = flys. Or throw old underwear in the corner and add urine = rats. Or let stored wheat/barley get wet = mice. People really believed this. We learn about it in biology. I’m now going to add - leave gray tube socks in the attic = mice.
Patrick • 04/25/04 • 3:23 PM:What else is interesting is how you can go 180 from the desire to save this stuff to the desire to throw it all away. That’s what has happened to me. I never was the type to save everything, but I did save a lot of stuff like school papers, gray tube socks (because they weren’t making them anymore, and when I was younger I liked the uniqueness wearing them gave me), even old Observers (ND’s newspaper). I’ve thrown a lot of that away now (including last weekend, after Dad had brought it out so I could get it out of his house). And while I felt a few pangs of nostalgia going through some of that stuff (remembering, for instance, the Academic Decathlon from high school and seeing that I had blown away everybody on my WP team (that was something I hadn’t remembered)), I mostly just didn’t want all that crap. Still, in the end, and because my time was short, I didn’t throw it all away. I left some things that I didn’t have time to go through, just in case there might be something worthy hidden among my school notes and papers. It’ll probably be ten years before I sit down to look through that stuff again, but maybe by then I’ll have forgotten my youth completely, and some of those papers will jog my memory. Or maybe my kids will be interested in seeing some of the doodles I made in my notebooks. Or maybe I’ll want to write something and can use the dates and information on some of the concert ticket stubs or WP play programs I’ve got. I dunno.
In any case, I resist acquiring more stuff. I don’t like the feeling of being surrounded. But I can’t be as free of stuff as I want to be because I have four other people with me, and they need their stuff too. I can only hope to organize it a bit, because I’ve certainly become a maniacally anal person in my nearing-middle-age. That’s what makes me a good editor, I guess. I can’t abide disorder (though when it creeps up on me, I sometimes can’t find the energy to fight it off). Whatever it is I’ve got, I don’t think it’s the same as those families you mentioned. I really hope not.
About the mice, though: I still want to know how they get up in the attic.
David • 04/26/04 • 7:37 PM:Just to be clear, I don’t think you are any where near like those schmamlies, not at all. I was just commenting on the extreme cases of packrattedness. No worries.
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