The Tenants

Off and on all spring we’ve had these thumb-sized mice darting around the kitchen baseboards faster than the light from a laser pointer. Off and on all spring we’ve had these shiny black ants using their delicate feelers to probe all the soaps and sponges in the bathroom.What to do? Mousetraps work, sure, especially when baited with peanut butter, but how many mousetraps can you set before you start feeling like a serial killer? How many exquisitely fashioned insect bodies can you crush before you feel twinges of shame?Yet I enter the kitchen nights and see a mouse scooting so fast around the baseboards my eyes can hardly follow it. I enter the bathroom mornings and the place is a-shimmer with ant-dancing.Our problem is we’ve grown tender-hearted enough over the years that we’re much slower to spring for the executioner’s implements. (I once watched as a little spider landed on David’s nose, a tiny thing that began rappelling down toward his chin like a climber descending a cliff-face. He just unhooked that delicate rope of web, went to the door and set the whole thing down outside.)Now, to complicate things even more, a sparrow has built her nest inside the glass globe of our front porch light.  We realized it because every time we set foot on the porch we there was this great and general fluttering. It took days before we thought to look over our heads to see where she flew from.We can’t actually see inside the light’s globe – its glass is opaque - but we’re think she’s hatching a family in there.  Also, a tiny egg appeared under this light fixture one day, smashed in pieces on the porch floorboards. Poor bird! She didn’t know she lived inside an oven; never guessed how likely it was that a switch could be slipped, wildly overheating her nest. Is this what happened, and the egg was damaged, so she nudged it overboard?Last summer, a mourning dove made her nest on the sill of an upstairs window here and for six straight weeks we watched her sit her eggs and tend her babes – not one, but two separate batches of them.  It just took us outside ourselves to watch them; softened our hearts to see the way she came to trust us. We could stand within inches of her, watching through the window glass and she would only regard us calmly as she stooped to feed and nuzzle her struggling offspring.So maybe soon this sparrow will trust us too. Anyway we've taped the light switch in the 'off' position, so no one will again set her nest on Broil. The mice and ants will move out soon, we know, but our thoughts keep returning to this small tenant, who is so like us in a way: who lives and moves and has her being entirely  oblivious to the fact that eyes more powerful than she can picture or imagine are daily upon her, watching,  to keep her safe.