Tough Guy
Suddenly a mouse is here
from nowhere.
I am so much bigger,
but startled,
jump up on the couch
and yell for my little,
but fierce, wife.
(Thank you Will S.
for just the right words.)
Her broom saves me.
I return to reading,
but scan the floor
regularly, uneasily,
fearfully.-Steve Shoemaker, August 2, 2014
Steve’s memory prompts one of my own from years ago at our home in Cincinnati.
My parents were visiting at the time. My mother, like Steve, was lying on the couch reading when she spotted a mouse, her worst nightmare. She leapt up on the couch and screamed. “Ick! There’s a mouse in here!”
For the next 10 minutes the little mouse scampered around the living room, ran up the drape cord on the right side of the double patio door, across the top of the doors, and down the cord on the left side. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Maxine, the slow-witted cat, sat quietly, swiveling her head from right to left, watching with feline detachment while one of the humans got a paper bag and a broom from the kitchen. Whatever fear there was quickly turned to the side-splitting laughter as the oppressed little creature scurried past us and through the broom sweeper’s legs legs to the opposite end of the living-dining room, under the dining room table, back to the other end past the swishing broom until at long last it found its exodus from pharaoh’s persecution through the patio doors which, at long last, the tough guys had the good sense to open.
Over the years I’ve come to believe there is no difference between a man or woman and a mouse. We’re all mice. Somewhere a mouse is laughing at us.
– Gordon
Views from the Edge 
Reminds me of an incident many long years ago, wherein a mouse scurried across the floor in the living room of our fourth floor apartment near Loring Park, My first husband promptly jumped up on the stuff arm chair while I tipped over the chair the mouse had run under. It then escaped to the corner closet and down the hole from when it came… I was not scared of mice and thought them rather cute… On the farm I grew up on, meeting mice, rats and garter snakes was not uncommon. Our Cellar was stoned wall, crawl spaced under the part that was the original homestead shack, and the newer section had concrete walls, but was dirt floored. I went down to get a jar of something, turned on the pull light between shelving in our cellar and there , on the shelf, at eye level was a little mouse, round eared, and bright eyed, sitting up and looking at me. I looked at it, and then it scampered away. That was my inspiration for how to draw a mouse. Never mind all the mice that scamper away in the barn the year the barn cats had been killed by distemper and the mice flourished. We soon got a new batch of farm kittens from another farm family and cat and mouse balance was restored.
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Oh ick!
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