I couldn’t make sense of the mouse trap; it was a catch and release model. Two doors on either side of the cage with what looked like a metal toothpick to spear a piece of cheese, or something you’d use in a cocktail with an olive or cherry. Mom said we’d need to drive the mouse somewhere; you couldn’t just let them out right here or they’d run back in. But it seemed ridiculous driving mice to the outskirts of the village. The cage itself looked ridiculous and so was I, doing a YouTube search or asking Laszlo how it worked. It was easier to just live with the mice.

Five years sober this week though I wasn’t sure the date. At the base of the Himmelsleiter, the tall concrete wall supports the train tracks with an angled underpass cut through the bottom at even increments. A long time ago someone painted the words Liebe Liebe Frieden on the wall in tall characters (love, love peace). When the train comes around the bend it moves in segments and makes a dry whistling sound like a sword unsheathed. It’s the brakes on the steel rails. Yesterday it was too dark coming up and genuinely scary at times, using my night vision down the foot path to the river, the spooky underpass that smells of urine. Then the stench of rotting grapes. If you want to get over alcohol maybe dwell on that smell a while.

Roosters crowing and dogs barking, the birds that screech among the leaves when dawn breaks and the first day’s bells toll from the neighboring towns. We could be timeless standing here in these fields, the same as it was the first time we left many years ago. Nothing much has changed, not the earth nor the bells, nor these power lines with their arms stretched out like sentinels. Not the cyclist approaching with their light, not these trees. Or the twinkling lights from that far-away ridge. The traffic is like the tides, the fog on the fields some gray muzzled dog’s coat. There was a time the world wasn’t good enough but the world hasn’t changed, only me.

There’s some lesson in the mouse trap, how these small things can be symbols right in front of your face. How you can just trip the catch and find yourself forever locked inside.

Categories: Addiction, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, travel