MOLI VIEW™

A few days ago, I caught a rather large mouse in the act of eating a harvest pumpkin my mother had artfully placed on our living room table. I shooed him away, but left the pumpkin there. If he was going to be eating things, he might as well finish what he started. Then the exterminator came, and though I'd hoped to find someone certified in green extermination practices, he lay poison behind my arm chair, where the mouse had set up camp.

Either the little guy succumbed, or he just moved to the kitchen. Some mouse, in any case, dashed across the kitchen from the bottom of the refrigerator to the bottom of the dishwasher the other afternoon. Yesterday morning I caught a glimpse of him, at the base of the trash can, before he scurried back under the dishwasher, leaving his tail trailing. I swooshed him with a broom and he pulled his tail in behind him.

I needed to call the exterminator again, and to seal a loose board on the roof. But that would have to wait. This mouse was the least of my problems. My attention is focused on my son, who has been having a rough time since a recent hospitalization for severe anxiety and panic attacks.

He had put up a happy front in dealing with his troubles for several weeks, but now he was beginning to feel worn down. And pissed off. What's that stage of grief? Anger, without a doubt. Why did this have to happen to him? It isn't fair. The good humor that bookended his anxiety began to give way to sullen resentment. It broke my heart.

And then, yesterday, our youngest dog, Pudge — the incorrigible runt with a Napoleon complex — thrust himself under the telephone table, his bushy, fox-like tail wagging madly. He'd found the mouse!

Previous Page  1  2  Next Page