Torch bearers

 I don’t know what it is lately, but the mice seem to be winning.

Earlier this year, the eastern meadow vole -- as field mice are called in the Northeast, or Microtus Pennsylvanicus, if you speak Latin -- turned my mother-in-law’s new car into their very own brick house by gnawing through layers of tasty and colorful insulation and sharpening their teeth on the wires within, shredding them and six thousand dollars in repairs. 

Recently, the same mice (or maybe their cousins) had turned a standard driving, fully electric riding mower into a literal zero turn. We discovered this when my husband, trying to be helpful and mow her meadow, couldn’t maneuver the machine out of its parking space. It wouldn’t move even a centimeter in any direction.   

He and I spent the better part of an hour scratching our heads and wondering if somehow the parking brake had remained engaged despite all electronic indicators to the contrary. When he popped an access panel on the floor of the mower, the evidence was clear: he had found the pungent smell of mouse excrement and the sparkling confetti of plastic dust where wires had been.

“How do you know how to do things?” his mother marveled after her son had disappeared for a few minutes and reappeared with a bag from the local hardware store containing a length of wire and a bottle of rodent repellant. 

“Necessity.” 

After we pulled out a wire crimper from a household multi-tool kit and bandage scissors from a first-aid kit, depositing each of them into his outstretched hand with the efficiency of scrub nurses, his repairing of the assembly seemed to go like clockwork. In no time, the patient was tearing around the yard and mowing down grass as if nothing had happened.

But it did seem like a minor miracle.

Until we returned home and found our son’s car, having sat idle for a week in the driveway, wouldn’t start.

When I arrived car-side, telling the kid his dad was on the way with jumper cables, he voiced his skepticism that the problem would be solved by recharging.

“Honestly … it doesn’t sound like the problem is the battery. It eventually starts, but it doesn’t stay on.”

Maybe it’s just coincidence or a spate of bad luck, but while I opened the hood to look around – doing the only things I know to do, like pull out the dipstick and check the oil – my son pointed to a gnawed clump of wires poking out of a plug-like device in the center of the engine. “Does that look like the work of mice?”

“You aren’t going to believe this,” I yelled to his dad as he approached with the cables. “Looks like while the cats were away, the mice did play.”

“That’s an oxygen sensor. I won’t be able to rewire that, but I can order a part. It shouldn’t be that difficult to replace. You can do it yourself.”

I could tell from his expression our son didn’t quite agree, but he was game to try.

And when the part came in, it was the boy who realized it and had to go back because it wasn’t the right one. And it was the kid who took the mangled old part to the shop to make the correct exchange.

After that, it took him no time to make the repair.

I’m fairly certain that, years from now, if his mother-in-law asks him how he learned how to do these things, he might be tempted to tell her it was “YouTube,” or that "mice make excellent teachers," but he will know his dad had something to do with it, too.