The Only Good Mouse...

I’ve talked about pests here before, namely bunnies and voles, but today I have another pest to talk about…mice.

We live in the country and mice are not unusual to have around.  We occasionally get one in the house and keep a trap or two in the basement to catch any that come wandering in.  We haven’t had one in the house itself for a couple of years, I think.  The more finish work that gets done, the fewer places there are for any critters to creep in. 

However, yesterday was a new experience altogether.  Paul was gone and Peter and I were sitting at the table, finishing up homework when Peter looked up and suddenly yelled, “There’s a mouse!”  “Where?” I shouted.  “On the counter by Daddy’s glass.”  I look over and, sure enough, there is a little brown mouse running across MY KITCHEN COUNTER!!!

I ran over to watch where it was going and couldn’t find it anywhere.  I got the flashlight to get a better look and still couldn’t see the little rascal.  I put a small block of wood at the end of the counter to stop any further progress and kept looking around.  I couldn’t see anything moving at all.  Suddenly the block of wood went over the edge and the mouse took off running down a power cord that happened to be right there.  Under the stove it went.  By the way, it was pretty impressive to watch it run down the power cord you see in the picture!

 I put Peter on mouse watch while I got a couple of big towels and blocked off as much of the exit as I could, hoping to keep it from heading out to other parts of the house.  We put a mousetrap in the area left open and waited.  Then we got the bright idea to turn on the oven to warm things up and, maybe, flush it out.  We waited quite a while but nothing happened.  Peter went to his room and put a barrier up at the base of his door.  After about 10 minutes, I heard the trap snap and quickly headed toward the kitchen, just in time to see our house mouse head into a space at the bottom of the dishwasher.  I stuffed one of the towels in front of it to block egress and moved the trap to the area under the sink, next to the dishwasher.  And there it sits. 

In the meantime, I had to remove everything from the countertop and disinfect the whole area. 

The trap was snapped this morning but nothing was in it…must be a quick little bugger.  We put a couple more traps around in hopes of nailing the invader.  I’m sorry but, at our house, the only good mouse is a dead one!

And still counting

These two smiling people are my parents.  They are smiling because they just got married (obviously from the attire) and were feeling pretty happy.  They were just youngsters at the time…truly youngsters, only 18 years old, both of them.  This picture was taken 60 years ago this month.  They celebrated their 60^th anniversary on March 9^th.  It seems fairly amazing for two people to be married that long, in this day and age, anyway.  But if you knew my parents, you wouldn’t be amazed at all. 

They are two of the loveliest people I know.  Not only do I love them, because they are my Mom and Dad, but I like them for who they are.  They are kind, generous, open-hearted people.  They are intelligent and full of good, old-fashioned common sense.

They are wonderful parents who raised three children into well-adjusted, productive citizens.  They were consistent and strict but never mean.  They are supportive of us in our endeavors and express pride in us, even now, for our accomplishments.  We never, ever doubted that we were loved.  I didn’t realize, until I was an adult, how lucky I was to have the kind of parents and upbringing I had. My friends have joked for years that I grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting. 

Their marriage is a shining example of what a relationship should be.  Of course, they’ve had ups and downs, like every couple, but they’ve weathered them intact.  They taught us by their example that it’s important to communicate with each other and to laugh together.  It’s obvious, if you are around them for any length of time, that they love and respect each other.  They are still as happy as they were in that picture.

So, I am taking this opportunity to honor them…for who they are and for the longevity of their marriage.  Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Patience is a Virtue

It snowed.  I know, I know, snow here isn't really big news but, this was significant snow...especially for the first of March.  General consensus was that we got around 14 inches in this one storm.  My neighbors across the road, who have lived here their entire lives, said it was the most they could remember in one blow.  It was amazing to watch the big, fat, wet flakes coming down and coming down and, still, coming down.

 

 School was closed.  Roads were closed.  Appointments were canceled.  It was truly a snow day.  We had biscuits for breakfast, built a warm fire, and snuggled in. Peter built a snow family in the front yard and created a snow fort from the pile left by the snow plow earlier in the day.  Our neighbor, Butch, kindly plowed our driveway so we could get out, if need be.  The snow was really deep.
 
 When the storm started, I was in a kind of disbelief.  It was the first of March, after all.  It was time for a little spring action.  Just a couple weeks ago I was finding snowdrops in the yard.  Hope was springing eternal...or something like that.  

But I have found that, living on the Palouse, March does not guarantee spring...in fact, neither does April or May, for that matter.  Winter leaves slowly, kicking and screaming, and one must be patient.  I've learned to wait another week or two to plant those porch pots, even when I'm dying for some flowers.  If I do it too early, the flowers are the ones dying and I have to start over again.  

And I was just talking last week about it being time to plant the snow peas and sweet peas, according to my past few years' garden journal entries.  I think I'll be waiting on those for a bit longer, too.  It's going to take a while for 14 inches to melt completely away.

It was as if the snow gave us permission to just hang out and not worry about going anywhere or doing anything.  All in all, it turned out to be a lovely day.