I had to go to Home Depot on Saturday. Thrilling, I know.
After a tantrum over appropriate Home Depot footwear and another over whether or not K should eat pizza for lunch, we found ourselves standing in the pest removal section of the store.
We live in an old city rowhouse, we get bugs. We've seen a cockroach or two in our basement and we generally get ants this time of year.
My husband and I are standing in the aisle staring at the selection of products to kill anything unwanted in anyway you want. We're having a discussion on whether it would be worth it to kill the cockroaches if it also kills the cats, when from the sky something falls down on us, well, nearly on us. It falls inches in front of us...and then scurries away.
It had an effing tail! A freaking mouse fell from the ceiling! Holy shit! Oh my gosh! It could have landed on my head!
I look up and survey the scene, wondering if hundreds of mice are now going to fall down on us. I've seen Infested on Animal Planet. I saw footage of the Australian mouse plague of 1993. I've watched the opening scene of Ratatouille. Where there is one of these rodents, there are hundreds.
Up above the rodent and pest removal aisle, high up on a platform was a pallet of grass seed. It was wrapped in plastic which the mice had chewed through to build a nest, have lunch or whatever the hell a colony of mice does in a pallet of grass seed. I look down in front of my feet, sure enough, grass seed.
As my husband and I are sharing this bonding moment where I was almost pelted in the head by a mouse, discussing the irony of the mouse falling a foot from hundreds of mouse traps, a Home Depot sales guy in the orange apron stumbles upon us asking if he could help with anything.
"Well, I think you have a mouse problem up there. One just fell on us and ran away."
With a straight face he says, "Oh, yeah, I know. We had a hawk in here for a little while. That helped out a bit."
It's like National Geographic in Home Depot.
"Anything else I can help you with?"
I was stunned. I guess I expected him to be concerned about my well being. Maybe get on his walkie talkie and page a supervisor. Feign interest just to pacify a customer. But nope, that wasn't going to happen. He didn't even appreciate the irony of the mouse landing in the rodent removal aisle. I guess this was just far too common place. Maybe over in plumbing a raccoon was wandering around.
