You Never Only Have One Mouse: Rule Number One

 

Bluebottles & Dustbunnies

I learned a rule the hard way, living in an historic house in Franklin called "Sweet Home." And that was, You never have only one mouse.

At first, the appearance of a mouse feels small. Manageable. You see one dart across the floor and think, "Cute. I'll handle it. But the truth is, the moment you see one, you’re already late. That's because the mouse isn’t the problem.

It’s the evidence.

Field mice hunkering down under a house

By the time you see one mouse, there are already paths in the walls, patterns in place, a system quietly operating beneath your awareness. You’re not seeing the beginning—you’re seeing what finally surfaced.

It was that realization that changed how I saw everything.

When my family first brought Wesson into the house, we thought we were solving a problem. Clean, simple, controlled. But what we didn’t understand was that he wasn’t stepping into an empty space. He was stepping into something already established. Something we didn’t fully see.

And that stressed Wesson out. He was only a juvenile in a 3500+ square-foot home that had been around for the better part of 200 years. So, what we thought was one mouse (maybe two or three), we didn't understand was the cumulation of generations of mice (for the better part of 200 years).

"Sweet Home" from the hedges

One afternoon during winter when I was in the music room playing the piano, I kept hearing tiny squeaks. I kept playing. The squeaks persisted. For some reason, I lifted up one of the ivory keys where I was surprised to see a litter of five mice, all curled up on top of each other. Poor things probably had a splitting headache.

In other words, they were everywhere. We just couldn't see them.

And that’s the part that stayed with me, toying with my thoughts. Because it isn’t just about mice. It’s about how life works.

• One argument is rarely just one argument.
• One bad habit is rarely isolated.
• One moment of anxiety is rarely random.

They’re signals.

Trying to figure out the mouse problem...

We tell ourselves, “It’s just one,” because it’s easier. Easier than asking what else is there. Easier than pulling back the surface and realizing something deeper has been there all along.

But once you see it, you can’t unsee it. You start to understand that most of what shapes your life is quiet, patterned, and just out of view.

And that’s the real shift.

• Not reacting to what you see.
• But learning to question what you don’t.

Because you never only have one mouse. That's one of the reasons I wrote Bluebottles & Dustbunnies: to memorialize how ignorance of natural wisdom like "You never only have one house" can cause frustration that spills over into so much of our lives that we find it hard to sleep.

You only ever have your first glimpse of something bigger.

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I GOT A CAT TO SOLVE A MOUSE PROBLEM—and Found Something Else Entirely...

Bluebottles & Dustbunnies:

A Southern Gothic War Story

(Told by a Cat)

IN THE FALL OF 2012 my family and I moved from the suburbs into an antebellum home (c. 1801) in Franklin, Tennessee. Tall ceilings. Long hallways. Mantled fireplaces. Trapdoors. Wide-planked wood floors. It was beautiful and alive in ways I couldn’t quite explain. 

The antebellum "Sweet Home" in Franklin, TN

We were leasing it from an octogenarian named Livingfield More, a World War II veteran. He took kindly to me because he had served as an American guard at Dachau in 1945, and I had visited the Dachau Concentration Camp twice as a child. The house carried his history—its austerity, its discipline. It felt ordered but not entirely controlled. 

My brother & me in front of the ovens of Dachau (c.1979)

And then there were the mice. Not one or two (you never only have one mouse), but enough to make it clear this wasn’t just a nuisance—it was a system. Something was happening beneath the surface of what we could see. 

This photo goes without saying.

So, we did what people do. We adopted a cat from Music City Animal Rescue (MARS). His name was Wesson. He had green eyes that, strangely, reminded me of my own. From the beginning, Wesson didn’t feel like a pet. He felt like a presence—alert, observant, still in a way that suggested he was always listening to something we couldn’t hear. Well… like a cat, I suppose. 

Daughters Edith (left) and Jane (right) the day we adopted Wesson.

And then, within three months, he was gone. 

 No warning. No long illness. Just a sudden absence that didn’t make sense. We found him in his bed by the wood-burning fireplace in the kitchen. What we could piece together pointed to rat poison: likely residue left behind in the barn from years before. Something unseen. Something lingering. 

We buried him in the backyard. The house felt different after that. Quieter. But not in a peaceful way. 

Burying our cat outside the herb garden.

For a few days, I brooded over it. Over the feeling that something about it didn’t add up. Not logically. Not emotionally. The kind of rationalizing that follows grief. 

 And then a thought came to me that I couldn’t shake: What if he didn’t just find the poison… what if he was led to it? 

I know how bezerk that sounds, but that was the moment the idea of Bluebottles & Dustbunnies came to me.

Me at one of my writing spaces at Sweet Home.

• The mice were no longer just mice. 
• The flies were no longer just flies. 
• The house was no longer just a house. 

It became a system. A layered world operating just beneath perception. A quiet war where territory mattered. Where intelligence existed without language. Where introducing something innocent—like Wesson—into an old, established environment could be perceived as resistance, no matter how small or harmless he seemed. 

Though narrated by a cat, Bluebottles & Dustbunnies is a story about the systems we don’t see, the territories we assume are ours, and the quiet, often invisible forces that shape our lives without asking permission. But it took me thirteen years to realize that, from a storytelling perspective, it was Wesson who was the lens through which that world revealed itself. Because he was a cat, and, therefore, "closer to the ground" than I was. He was paying attention. 

The fields around Sweet Home

provide a never-ending supply of field mice.

We’ve had five cats since then. But what stayed with me about Wesson was the sense that a mysterious blend of Oligocene instinct, feline wisdom, and lethal capabilities was part of something much larger and ancient than human knowing. A precipice over a looming ravine up to which I stepped without realizing it. 

 And once you feel that, you can’t unfeel it so easily.

Robbie Grayson III is founder of Traitmarker Media, LLC, in Franklin, Tennessee, where he functions as Story Liaison, blending publisher, promoter, and publicist roles.