Where's my fan boy?

Holy cranky ladies, batman! This heat is getting to me. I'm starring in my very own version of "Grumpy Old Men". Except I'm a gal and, while I'm not a spring chicken, I'm not sure I could be considered old, either.
But then. There are the hot flashes. I'm not talking tiny little "oh, gee, it's warm in here" flashes. Oh, no.  It's a sweating-buckets, face-the-shade-of-a-tomato-covered-fire  truck, need-to-wring-out-my-shirt flash. I never do things small.
Maybe it's the hormones. Could be my thyroid. But it's probably just the fact that it's July in Arkansas. 102 in the shade today. According to my thermometer and our black lab, anyway. The weather guy says it was only 97. I think the dog was probably more accurate.
It's funny what triggers a memory sometimes.
As I was sitting in front of the fan, wringing my sweat soaked shirt for the 5th time in an hour, my son starts talking about our mouse problem. Seems our cats have decided they are vegetarian, and he wants to resort to tear gas and little mouse sized bean bag guns. Whatever works.
But with the combination of mice and the heat, my mind went back to summers over 30 years ago.
My cousins & I were at my grandma's house nearly all day every day during the summers. We'd play in the woods, swim in the creek, raid the dump for broken bikes and bottles. But one of our favorite places was the spare bedroom right off of grandma's living room. We'd play "house" for hours, our babies 2 quite scary looking life-sized dolls with clumps of missing hair. We loved those dolls.
However. Grandma had a mouse problem. Multiple mice, actually. Of course. Like chips, you really can't have just one.

Grandma loved mouse poison. You know, the little pellets that look remarkably like some sort of fiber cereal. And she put this stuff EVERYWHERE. In the closets, under the couch, behind the TV, between the pots in the kitchen cabinets. This was before she got overly concerned with accidental poisonings or such. You see, we grandkids were so well behaved and rarely got into anything without asking. It wasn't until those pesky great-grands came along that there were problems.
Right.
In any case, the mice loved the poison too. And we all know where mice go to die. Why they like the most interior wall, smack in the middle of the house, I'll never know. But grandma's mice did. In fact, I think there must've been a little mouse cemetery in that one wall, rarely did they die anywhere else.
But that wall. The wall in between the living room and spare bedroom. The room we loved to play in. Every summer, without fail. Just when it would begin to heat up, a mouse would die in the wall. And just when it would *almost* stop smelling to high heaven, along came another "fresh" one.  Grandma went through so many cans of air freshener, she really should've taken stock in Glade.
Like I said....funny what triggers a memory. I can still smell the dead mice and the Hawaiian scented air freshener grandma would spray every 10 minutes.

To this day, I don't like either.