Of Mice and Men

Vermin
Each morning in the barn, I try to do something extra while I'm doing my chores. One morning, I cleaned stall windows, or removed few cobwebs. Yesterday morning, I decided to hang up some of the saddle blankets that were tossed in a pile in the tack room, thinking we didn't need so many, and some of them could perhaps be packed away.

As I picked one up and turned to hang it, I heard a distinctive squeak. I stood still, afraid the mouse was climbing Mount Junosmom. Seeing no mouse, I looked down and saw a nest with four baby mice, all pink and defenseless. One had been crushed by my giant white tennis shoes. The smart farmer thing to do was to drown the remaining ones, but the mommy in me cannot do that to defenseless little babies, even if later, when they are adults, I will mercilessly snap off their heads in mouse traps.

I pushed them all towards the remains of the nest and left the tack room, knowing mice are good mothers, and she would come for them. Sure enough, later in the day, no baby mice were found, having been moved to another location.

Lessons Gone Astray
I often come across magazines where the pages have been altered by busy pens of a certain young boy. Photographs of women sport mustaches and goatees. This is supposed to be hilarious. Last night, as I was working about the house, I hear Anna joining in the fun with William, using her unique artistic abilities to disfigure the visage of a woman in the magazine. William giggled. He looked at the now heavily bearded, low-browed, and wild-haired woman and said, "She looks like a Canadian!"

It took us a moment to decipher that he actually meant "Neanderthal", a people who we had discussed earlier in the day. We had looked at photos in National Geographic and online. We had several times identified them as Neanderthals. How they became Canadian is beyond me.