Mission Impossible?

I TRY to be mad at them but the truth is I like the mice who live  in my kitchen, because they accept me as I am. In spite of the spilled flour, the boxes of bran bought back in the early ‘90s, the  potato chip crumbs lining the shelves of my cabinets. Still they choose and befriend me. They appreciate my pantry.And I feel just awful having to kill them. But just yesterday a person newly arrived on our shores told me it’s the mice or my health. “Their pee-pee,” he said. “It brings death.”My pals at the hardware store sell me the classic wooden mousetrap, which you can buy for a buck, bait with peanut-butter-coated string and boom! But of course it is then that you really see them in the perfection of their small forms: The tiny feet. The little tails. The guillotined necks you can hardly bear to look upon.It makes me nostalgic for the era when pee-pee and related 'matter' were prized as fertilizer, as it still is in China where, under the name “night soil,” it proudly stands as the inspiration for a patriotic song. I say sick of “The Star Spangled Banner?” Try having to sing “The Night Soil Gatherers Are Coming Down from the Mountain” at the start of a few ballgames!