THE GROSSEST THING EVER, brought to you by me.

Having spent two years as a struggling student in Toronto and two more in NYC, I have had more than an appropriate share of having to deal with mice. In Toronto I spent many nights listening to a colony of busy creatures building a small city beneath my floorboards and had to just assume they were also fashioning a beautiful blue ball gown, just for me, the single girl upstairs.
In NYC, the little guy really made himself at home and felt like family after I one day reached into a bag of Milano cookies and felt the terrifying warmth of a warm rodent body. Years later in Harlem I was almost accustomed to seeing plastic bags skittering across the floor.

I would call my mother so I could have company while I tried to sweep them away, and as with any unwelcome creature, she taught me that "our home is their home," and encouraged me to try to figure out how to casually throw the mice out the window instead of causing them any direct, visible harm that I would later have to have nightmares about.

Alhamdullilah, we have never had a mouse in our house here in Buffalo, other than the time that Cat (the name of our cat) brought one home in his mouth with such pride in his eyes, as cats do. I have been away for a while, but one of the first things my mother showed me when I got home from Tangier was two dollar bills that apparently the mice have been feasting on just outside the garage. She let them have them for a while, then decided she wanted them back, and casually brought them in and left them on the kitchen table. I am completely aware that this is the grossest thing I have ever scanned in my life, but even stranger than my feeling compelled to scan a small pile of half-chewed US currency is that my mother's reason for showing me the chewed up money is because she thinks it is sad that we did not remember to feed the mice, to make sure they were okay throughout the cold Buffalo winter. Because our home is their home.