When I was little and pictured a life of adventures, I saw myself riding on horses (sometimes camels) across big dramatic landscapes — always pausing at the top of the hill for a view of the sunset over the crashing sea. I had companions of all ilks and was always bound to meet some fascinating people on the road. Perhaps I was bushwhacking through a jungle narrowly avoiding massive spider webs, monkeys swinging above head, and something else deep in the woods. (The edge of fear in this last image came from the R.U.S.s of The Princess Bride which always scared the living bejeezus out of me). The defining parts of an adventuress person is their bravery, their energy, their urge to keep forging ahead. I was aiming right towards Adventuress Janet as soon as I could waddle around. 

Well this morning, I had to remind myself to be brave, to forge ahead. To face the discomfort with a brave face. I was not climbing mountains or swimming out into the depths. I was looking at a pathetic wriggling mouse stuck in the glue trap. I was looking at the horrors I had wrought out of a simple desire to protect my carrots and bread from little teeth. What cruel god was I? I too loved to nibble on carrots and bread. 

I had spotted his (I had assumed) corpse last night just before heading to bed last night. I was not brave. My energy was gone. The furthest I could forge ahead was to slip the dust pan under the trap and deposit the whole thing on my porch. I had foolishly placed the trap in corner that always collects water and the fragile cardboard was dangerously bowing this way and that as I got the mouse — now clearly alive and suffering — out of the house. 

But delay only ever puts off the adventure!

Would you rather kill a mouse in the darkening night or in the awful clear cool light of morn?

(At least I have a new get-to-know-ya question.)

 Although I locked out the image of the poor pathetic not-corpse of a mouse in glue by firmly closing the door, his poor pathetic wiggly foot was still on my mind. My sensitive-never-killed-anything-bigger-than-a-two-inch-bug-vegetarian-ass had to crawl into bed knowing there was work to do in the morning. Some part of me hoped it would magically disappear in the night. Little mice-killing elves would finish my work for me. 

But alas, there in the pale light of dawn, lay a mouse glued to a soft soaked piece of cardboard.  And it had shit itself. The brown panic-induced goop fused into the glue like some oil spill in the Gulf. 

I had sent a text — a missive, if you will, in adventure-ese — to a friend with a real mouse problem the night before: What was I supposed to do with the pathetic rodent now that it was caught? Paul had a real mouse problem and several glue traps. This was my first resident mouse. (One had come before him, but I saw him only as I came back from my trip and never again. We seemed to have a time-share agreement.) “A life covered in glue is no life at all” Paul replied (how true, how true). But he too did not like to kill them. He tended to scrap them off with a stick toss them to the field. I decided I’d leave mine to die in his own private way, as well. 

I sought a stick. Fields were in abundance. 

As I scraped, the water-logged cardboard gave way, tearing a hole. The mouse’s belly came free only to roll itself backwards. Now its back was attached. It was encased in a thick wrapping of glue. It continued to squirm. 

In the process of my desperate scraping, Maman Jacobo came by. Bent double, stick in the right hand, water-logged, heavy-with-rodent glue trap in the left, we exchanged our regular string of greetings. Other than a mild curious glance towards my activity, she walked off home with a last “yaaaa.”  Was this a normal sight to her? Or was she just doing her best to be nice and not interfere with the strange activities of the white lady next door. Placing that pondering on communication across cultures on the back burner, I turned back to the task at hand. 

Every scrap seemed to cover the squirming body in more glue. The cardboard fully split in two. I dropped it all where I stood at the end of the field. I stared down at the sticky, sopping cardboard. I turned towards home.

Not brave at all. 

But call it a strategic retreat. For the Adventuress lives on inside me. Even if I thought I was leaving it all to fate. 

I took the compost out. I fed Zorro. I set the coffee to brew. I straightened a few things on the kitchen table. I went outside. I faced the music. 

For a brief moment upon my return I thought the mouse had been freed or taken. But the cardboard had simply wrapped him in a living coffin of glue, hidden among the weeds. With the help of several layers of leaves, I took the mouse by the tail. I yanked. I pulled. With a string of glue behind him, he was free! I swung the tail and launched him into the field.

Thaaaaawap! He hit a corn stalk. Like Christ on the cross he was attached. 

I could face the horrors no more. 

Perhaps, like heads on stakes of the fortresses of yore, I thought, his body glued to the corn stalk would warn others of the rodent kingdom to not approach, to return from whence they came. A tough, vegetarian Adventuress lives her. (Even if she had nearly Don Quioxite-ed up the whole thing). 

I gathered up the broken pieces of the trap and set them to dry. The coffee was boiling on my return. 

In adventure novels, I love trope of the old man in the corner of the tavern — the man with a story to tell. Often his body bears the marks of years on the road. A long scar that sharpens in the flickering firelight. Rider in The Lord of the Ringers, The Captain in Treasure Island, many a layered narrator in Joseph Conrad’s novels. I don’t yet bare too many scars of my adventures in Togo (other than the remains of scrapped knee from dancing (and falling) in Sokode). But frankly, that’s just fine. I don’t need a long scar on my cheek, thank you. Maybe my thinned body and new muscles show a bit of it. 

But my house does bare its own marks. In my storage-room-turned-yoga-studio there is a crisp black outline a scorpion I smacked so cleanly, so smoothly with a flip flop. That was my first kill. There are several other scorpion smears. Although no marks remain, I can clearly see the path the sun spiders ran through the house as Zorro chased them. And now a small corner will always be the glue-trap mouse-torture corner in my mind. 

I actually have stood on sun-soaked vistas staring off in to the horizon. It is as good as it sounds. But most of my bravery is built up from moments like these. Moments where it’s just me and the creatures among us. Moments where my principles and desires battle it out and I’m stuck holding a glue-covered mouse with a corn field illuminated by the rising sun in front of me.