A Taste Too Far

I keep two bottles of olive oil on the countertop in my kitchen. One, the lighter and less expensive version, is for everyday – frying eggs, sautéing garlic and onions, whatever. Whenever I will be using it in quantity and don’t it to interfere with the flavors of the other ingredients.

The other is the good stuff – extra virgin olive oil – the cost of which I have to defend every time I purchase it.

“There’s a difference,” I tell Husband. Like there’s a difference between homemade cookies fresh from the oven and the cardboard ones he buys in the supermarket. But a discussion of grades of olive oil and types of pressings and the taste of dipping anything edible into a pool of jade green heaven would be lost on him. Give him a baked potato with margarine on it and he’d be content.

“There’s just a difference, “ I say. “And a little goes a long way.” And I put it into the cart.

And I’m oh-so-abstemious with my treasure. A dab on my plain steamed vegetables. A dime-sized (oh, make that a quarter-sized) dot in which to dip my chaste, wheat-free crackers. A carefully measured teaspoon to mix into my brown rice or drizzle over my salad.

Sometimes after I’m done meting out my careful dose, I notice some of the foil from the label coming off on my fingers. The tiniest of residues is dripping from the cap after I seal it up. It doesn’t bother me greatly, and I don’t think about it. Now, if I saw a major quantity leaking out or pick up the bottle and see a little green ring on the counter, then I might take action, like transferring it into a decanter, but it isn’t enough to make a fuss.

Until yesterday.

I’d been wondering, these past few months - well, not merely wondering but enjoying the fact thereof – why we haven’t seen tail nor whisker of the usual ration of mice that move into our home and help themselves to whatever they can in our kitchen.

It’s never more than half a dozen or so, during a good cold winter, but still. None at all? No droppings left behind, no vitamin bottles gnawed, no bread wrappings chewed?

Yesterday our rodent-free streak came to a streaking halt.

“Husband!” I yelled up the stairs.

“What?” he yelled down, annoyed to have been disturbed from verifying his HTML. Or working on a project in Photoshop. Or cruising eBay for die-cast cars. Or whatever the heck he does up there in the afternoons.

“Mouse evidence!” I said.
Silence. I stare at the thing that gave the mouse away. My bottle of extra-virgin olive oil. The bottom of the label has been shredded, the way you might do to the label of your beer bottle with a fingernail when you’re standing around in a bar or at a party and the conversation runs thin. Bits of shiny label are scattered around the countertop.

At least this one, unlike the ones before who’d gone for my vitamin bottle caps or a candle or a bag of store-bought taco shells, has good taste.

Finally Husband answers. “I’ll set the traps.”

I saw the trap when I came downstairs this morning. All the other items on the counter –the “cheap” olive oil, the can of Pam (don’t ask), my tin of teabags, a ginormous cardboard vat of store-brand oatmeal - had been casually pushed away, as if to make the object of the mouse’s affection the center of attention. He’d even left the shreds of label in place. And the trap lurked just a hair downstage (what he had baited it with that would be more enticing than the smell of extra-virgin olive oil, I couldn’t imagine).

And after breakfast, after my exercises, after I’d just put on a self-hypnosis CD and sunk into a deep, back-relaxing trance, I heard the familiar rattling.

“Give any background noises your permission to be there and make them part of your trance…” the narrator says.

Rattle. Rattle, rattle, rattle. I thought I heard a tiny voice saying “Attica! Attica! Attica!”

No. I couldn’t make that part of my trance. My attention was drawn away from my deep relaxation breaths to that poor mouse, imprisoned for the simple act of wanting something more sumptuous in his diet. Or was it her diet? I couldn’t be sure. Were mice the sort of species that send the females ahead to find the food, or the males, or was it every rodent for him- or herself? Whatever I say is going to get me in trouble with somebody who reads this.

“It’s normal to drift in and out of your trance.”

Heck. I hadn’t drifted out, I’d been heaved out of the gentle waters and landed with a thud upon the shore.

I tried, I tried to let go and get back under, but no matter how many relaxation breaths I took or how much I tried to regain access to my happy place with its soothing colors, I was done. Password denied.

Besides, the CD was bout over anyway.

I checked on the mouse in the Have-A-Heart trap. It (whatever it was) was no longer rattling its cage and was sitting quietly, dark little body at one end and its tail curled around the corner.

I felt for it then, stuck in something it couldn’t get out of, not knowing its fate. I even admired him or her a little, not satisfied with the dregs that trickled down the sides of the bottle and trying oh, oh so hard to gnaw through that label to the lovely green stuff inside.

The little bastard.

Husband is still sleeping, but when he wakes up and prepares Mousie for his trip across town, maybe, just maybe I’ll throw in a little cracker dipped in olive oil.

You know, a little something for the ride.