Ma'am, Change Your Air Filter?

The car's fan blew out stenchy air for a while, but then the smell subsided and I went my merry way, thinking I could get the car's oil changed and the car vacuumed out and the state inspection/emissions test done all at once if I went to the Valvoline oil-change place. Their records said I hadn't visited since 2009, and this is because they charge a lot; in my view they overcharge, but you know how it is, you have to do all this, so, like a colonoscopy, you just get it over with, and before long, as I sat in the black linoleum waiting room on a black plastic-upholstered chair reading Missouri Conservationist, comes one of the meticulously clean and barbered well-pressed young men in his Valvoline shirt carrying my cabin air filter. "Miss, this is what we found," he said, and I knew he wasn't lying because about every two years a mechanic (whose face turns green as he does it) pulls an enormous stinky mouse nest complete with cadavers out of the exact same place, and this one at the Valvoline had a dead snake in it, too. He offered to change my air filter at a cost of $39.99. What could I do? Tell him to put it back in there? Most expensive oil change ever at $117. And when I got back in the car I said what, you didn't vacuum it? See, the cabin air filter is accessed behind the glove box, and it's changed by pulling it inward into the car, and rat's nest fuzzy shreds had sifted all over the passenger side. He said Valvoline hasn't vacuumed out cars for nine or ten years.

I was desperate because the interior was grubby, I'd already been to two car-vacuum cylinders, fed beaucoup quarters into both of them and neither worked, so I went home and risked my life taking my domestic vacuum cleaner outdoors onto the damp concrete and grass (never do that!) and vacuumed it out myself with the wand, because I had a hot date.

Jaws

Opening a drawer I found a fat mouse who'd shredded my gift wrap and done numbers one and two on a year's worth of greeting and birthday cards. I think only moms-to-be would be so sneaky, persistent, and destructive. They chewed through particle board into a cabinet, left piles of sunflower-seed hulls and dried beans on the mantel and in my shoes, and turds in my apron pockets. I wept. With weather cooler than normal for August I thought to bake a cake, light and not too sweet, and share it like a good Missourian, and opening the oven where pans are kept I saw enthroned in my cake pan a mouse nest clawed out of oven insulation with, fortunately, no mice in it. After my nausea passed (instead of baking, I hosed down all the pans and set the dishwasher on "sanitize"), I sent the landlord a photo and demanded he address in all seriousness the plague of mice I've had since spring. One or two in winter is normal in a country house. But five or ten in late summer, openly running along the baseboards: no. Worst in 14 years. So bad I stopped feeding the birds.

Enter Tim the handyman with the familiar blue Tomcat poison saying, "You just gotta hope they die outside," and when he set eight of these new kind of traps I wailed that these mice were too smart for traps, and he joked, "You just gotta get out the ol' .22." They're baited with a dollop of black gel -- the mice have been so bad I have two peanut butter jars, one for my mousetraps and one for me!! -- and one got caught along a major mouse thruway. With these I needn't touch the dead ones. Outside along the foundation Tim placed larger traps containing immense cakes of poison and said to refill them in two weeks. I said, there must be a hole there, why don't you find it and patch it up? Guess whose job that's gonna be.

Does Your Car Stink?

Cars mostly don't stink unless owners treat them like garbage scows, as did Demetrius, who also cut personal physical gases in his car, locked and left it so that the smell marinated all night, and to his surprise in the morning it had persisted and was enough to choke a moose, knock a buzzard off a shitwagon, et cetera, and enough so he accused me of sneaking out while he was sleeping and farting up his car just for spite. This past Sunday my car began stinking, especially when I used the blower or a/c. I checked myself first. It wasn't me, nor the hiking clothes in the trunk. Drove around with the windows open. Next day, worse. Checked beneath the seats; maybe a passenger had left food there?

The last time this happened I cringed at the smell for a few weeks figuring it was just mold in the a/c that'd dry up, but finally when the fan wouldn't turn and instead emitted a dreadful noise I went to my mechanic. He gave me the look that men give women when the woman says, "What stinks in here?" He returned to the waiting area with a huge wad of fuzz, shreds, and hay: a mouse nest, as disgusting to him as it was to me; the mouse had nested in the cabin air filter, which isn't accessible unless the glove box is removed by someone who knows how. That mechanic retired soon after. So I told my new mechanic what I suspected. Not only was it a mouse nest--Jeff put it in a box and showed me; it was a good 12 inches across--but it had a dead baby mouse in it, which he didn't show me. "Aww, poor mousie," said his wife, the clerk, as I paid her $47.