This past Sunday was Mother’s Day, which has a very special meaning in the Robleto family – manual labor. Each Mother’s Day all three Robleto children convene at the family house to find a list of chorus to accomplish, such as weeding the gardens or cleaning out the garage, followed by a very nice family dinner. This annual event, about 12 years in the making, has become a major Robleto family tradition, and moving away to DC did not excuse me from getting my hands dirty fixing up the home.

This year we were cleaning up the basement.

Back in our youth, the basement was where we played, and therefore needed to be cleaned routinely. When the Star Wars and He-Man figurines teamed up with the Transformers to vanquish the Thundercats and G.I. Joe, an epic inter-galactic battle typically ensued (the kind that comes naturally to the imagination of eight and nine year old boys). These inter-collectable wars frequently left the basement in need of some serious attention.

Yet, since the end of those childhood years, very little attention has been paid to the basement, and very few humans spend quality time in the basement, which made it a choice winter getaway for the local field mice.

The mice were performing a rather successful occupation of the basement territory. My mom, none-too-happy with the new house guests, took definitive action and declared a police state by setting out a couple of traps. The wily mice, however, were far too clever for such chicanery. They would take the cheese, leave the trap un-sprung, and poop in the general vicinity as a way of saying “this is our turf” or “next time spring for the gouda.”

This provocation led to all-out war. The invading mice has a few early victories, including the infamous display of their anti-Christian values by knocked down the Christmas tree (they were apparently climbing in the ever-decorated faux-evergreen trying to eat the shrink-wrapped candy canes off the branches and brought the whole tree down).

General Mom retaliated by unleashing a series of offenses including adding more sophisticated traps in greater numbers and finding and sealing the hole in the foundation. With their supply lines cut off, and traps abounding, the mice we’re unable to launch a formidable counter-strike and eventually died. The war for supremacy of the basement was over.

Mother’s Day was Reconstruction. The war had left the basement in shambles and there was much rebuilding that needed to be done; gnawed through items and furniture needed to be removed, and mice poop had to be swept up and disposed of. It took many trash runs out to the curb, and most of our afternoon, but when the day was done, the Robleto basement was back to the clean, safe innocent place we knew from our youth, where the only battles fought are between two equal forces of plastic figurines vying for control of Cybertron or maybe Castle Greyskull.

And after dinner, when night began to fall and I drove home to DC, I could take comfort knowing that at that very moment I was an entire year away from the next time I will need to sweep up mouse poop or whatever equivocal tasks are in store for the next Mother’s Day.