Shadow Mouse

This morning as I leaned into the closet in the laundry room, a dark shadow fell from above me. Looking down, I watched as the shadow materialized into a mouse scrambling to get out of the bucket on the floor. 

With incredible calm I informed my partner, Phyll, that there was a mouse in the house and that she needed to take the dogs into the bedroom so that I could remove it. She walked towards the back door to open it, whether to help me or to take the dogs outside I am not sure, so I again instructed her, with her mouth frozen in a surprised "o", to take the dogs into the bedroom. 

My plan was to put a towel on top of the mouse in the bucket to carry him safely outside, but when I opened the closet again, he was busy shimmying up the mop handle, so I took him as gently as possible in my rubber-gloved hands, and said to him, in the only language I know, that it was going to be all right. I could see from the one eye and twitching nose peeking out from my gloved grasp that he felt otherwise, and really who would feel all right in the hands of a creature hundreds of times its size?

Still I tried to make his journey as painless as possible, walking quietly out the back door and putting him down in the garden next to the porch. Sure he will find his way back in and will join his gazillion cousins in the basement or, perhaps the vast space between the ceiling and the roof of our school house, but for now he is at large. 

When I returned I found Phyll still looking startled, but she immediately shifted to the blame game. "That's it, the cats aren't doing their jobs; they should be fired."

Now we've only had Duke for a year or so, but Xena and Willow have been with us for the five years we have been together. Can you imagine the kind of severance packages we've have to put together for them?  And what is the likelihood of them ever finding work again at their age?  Sure Willow would be okay. According to Willow, once a street cat, always a street cat.  She has stayed sharp and ready, her knapsack packed and tucked near the door in case she has to take flight. Xena is another story. She has gone soft in all senses of the word. After she got off the streets she never looked back. I don't see her coping out there, though she could probably cry her way into a taxi ride if it came to that. She could make people do just about anything to make that crying stop. 

But no we won't fire the cats, at least not today. We're all about second chances and teachable moments, though it's a little discouraging when your pupils curl up in the sunlight, completely uninterested in your existence now that you've fed them. If they could put headphones on they would, which brings to mind my students: eyes glazed; jaws slack; in another world. Very inspiring. 

As I head out for my run, my thoughts return to shadow mouse, and I conjure him scurrying over mud and ice and snow, his heart thump-thumping his way to safety. 

P.S. Upon returning from my run, I found Duke on the kitchen counter batting about the ants that were traversing the counter.  Batting, mind you, not killing. It seems Phyll's threats of job termination fell on perky but deaf ears.