Late bloomer

Late in life – she will turn fifteen next summer – our cat has turned into a mouser. Two days running now, I have stumbled upon dead mice. I found the first by accident, in the laundry room. It was lying on a towel on the floor that Miss Cat appropriated quite some time ago as a soft place to curl up and hide from the boys, and I glimpsed it out of the corner of my eye. The laundry room is downstairs, next to the boiler room, and I’m sure the mouse came from the boiler room; we do all of our living on the ground floor, so a mouse or two in the boiler room doesn’t bother me much. It’s a farm; it’s inevitable.

This morning there was a dead mouse lying next to my bed when I woke up. It makes sense now, the way the cat jumped onto our bed in the middle of the night, pranced a little circle around me, and jumped down to the floor again with a soft cat thump. Then back to the bed, a circle, a thump. It is what she does when we accidently shut the bedroom door with her in the room, but the door was open, and it was four o’clock in the morning and I was annoyed and I pushed her – hard – off the bed. Then this morning, the mouse. Ah, yes. She had wanted  to show it to me, in the middle of the night. (Please, let’s all assume that the mouse was not in her mouth when she jumped up on the bed. Nevertheless, the sheets, they are being washed.) I’ve just finished reading The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig, and allow me to steal an expression from his character Rose: I take exception to mice – live or otherwise – in the bedroom.

Miss Cat has lived nearly all of her life in urban apartments. Now, in her old age, the farm is speaking to her instincts. Good for her. Just not in the bedroom.

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