Mortal Mickey

I rode to a meeting with the volunteer director of hospice. Her car was so immaculate I was inspired. Yesterday, I told the girls, "I am cleaning this car today, and I want you to get all that junk out of the back there."

They complied in record time. They threw it all in the front passenger seat.

We spent two hours throwing out trash, vacuuming the interior with a shop-vac and then the industrial vacuum at the car wash, cleaning the dashboard and doors, washing the floor mats, and wiping dog spit off the windows. While the car does look BETTER, it doesn't look brand new and gleaming, much to my disappointment. However, I do feel pretty spiffy when I run to the drug store.

Next I tackled the screened porch. Because the kids (and most likely us, too) have spilled dog food when feeding the marauding pack, we got dining customers. I came home the other night to catch a field mouse zipping up over the back of the glider. I yelped. "We have a MOUSE," I told EG in the same grim tones reserved for announcing pestilence and impending doom. That evening, I swept up all the dog food. As the little pest peered around the paint can under the glider, scuttled around the perimeter of the room, and escaped frantically through the crack under the storm door, EG asked, "Now what is that mousie going to eat?"

I gritted my teeth. "He isn't a 'mousie,' he is vermin."

Then I got the cute, God's creature, he gets hungry too, just one little mousie lecture. Lalalala, didn't want to hear it.

By the next day, the kids had named the "mousie," and I knew there would be no hope of using a trap on the nasty little critter. So yesterday I scrubbed and bleached and dusted the porch, too. Not only will the mousie not find even a morsel, he might die of the chlorine fumes.

Now I am getting flak from people who have watched Disney movies one too many times. Never mind that a so-many-times removed relative of mine was one of the people who put on the Mickey Mouse suit at Disneyland, vermin is vermin, Mickey notwithstanding.