It’s another chill morning in the farmhouse, because the
pellet furnace isn’t performing up to snuff.
Thank goodness for the propane fireplace in the living room!
I can languish in my comfy chair, wearing flannel jammies
under three fluffy blankets and the weight of both cats, until something calls
me to task in another room.
And it has to be pretty darn important to get me up!
It’s times like these when I take my free hours and head out
shopping – languishing on the heated seats of the truck like a seal on a sandy
shore.
If you see me in the parking lot, sitting with eyes closed while
listening to the radio, looking church-pew sleepy and nodding my head, don’t
knock on the window.
I’m not having a cardiac incident, I’m fine, and I’ll get
out on my own, eventually.
I spend time wandering through the new Swanton Hannaford
(blissfully heated) because I barely know where anything is located, even after
all these months.
When I returned from the market that day, I opened the
overhead garage door - arms loaded down with purchases, and immediately noticed
a dead mouse on the floor.
That happens more often than you might think.
It was a squishy flat red mess, except for the little rear
feet sticking up to the sky, like a wicked witch that had had a house dropped
on it.
I blamed the cats for chewing it up and spitting it out
where I would find it.
(Always with the blame for whoever isn’t around to defend
themselves.)
I ran around the horror of it all and squealed for my
husband Dan to dispose of the carcass tout de suite.
We made light of it with zombie jokes back and forth; since
the mouse was missing its head - and concluded that even the cats know how to
deal with the undead, due to the condition of the remains.
I’m against mice on principal, for the tens of thousand of
dollars they have cost me in damage at the cheeseplant over the years, and most
recently - one of the little bastards ate a hole in the top of the Styrofoam
box that I needed for shipping cheese - and subsequently chewed his way out of
the bottom, while defecating all over outside and inside – oh god, the powerful
gaggy smell that furry farty demon left behind for me to find at the last
minute.
As such, I’ve got no compassion for these annoying rodents
or how each wee gray and brown nemesis comes to meet its end.
Since I don’t diddle with hairy dead things, Dan scraped it
off the cement floor and noticed: bloody tire marks.
I had smushed flat it on my way out of the garage that
morning.
Ewww!
And for just a second there, I was worried that it hadn’t
been completely dead when I ran it over.
Just for that one second.
And then I was fine with it.
