Saving the Mousie

It's a gorgeous early July morning, and I've been sitting out at the picnic table for two hours, "canning" blog entries. As bloggers go, I'm an ant. Remember the Aesop's fable about the grasshopper and the ant? The grasshopper got up every morning and ate whatever happened to be around, and he made fun of the ant for laboriously carrying seeds and grains to her larder, hedging against the cold winter to come. When that cold winter arrived, the grasshopper showed up at the ant's door, starving, and acting like the ant was his bestest friend. The ant said, "Honk off!" or something like that, and slammed his little ant larder door in the grasshopper's face. Having been a grasshopper for most of my blogging life, serving it up fresh every day, I find it fits more with my temperament to write when I feel like writing, prepare some entries, and the coast on that work for awhile. Burned out bloggers, take note. It's one way to cope, to cheat that

I-gotta-do-this-every-durned-day??!!-what-was-I-ever-thinking-when-I-started-this

feeling.

So I'm writing this morning, as the sun climbs higher and I move around the yard looking for shade and a wireless signal. I've been out here since 7, and it's 9, and the whole time I've heard this little hollow plonking sound from the depths of the garage. I thought it might be a bird trapped in there, bonking on the window. So every now and then I'd get up and look around in the garage, and the plonking always stopped. Not a bird. Finally, I crept inside while the plonking was happening, and it sounded like something soft hitting plastic. OK. Let's look in the plastic bird feed buckets. And this is what I found.
A tiny baby white-footed mouse, the same kind that crawls into my recycling bins, my car manifold, the false cloth ceiling of my Explorer, or my dryer vent (to name just a few places on record) and conveniently dies.

Oh. You are CUTE. And so hungry and dehydrated.
Now, my first instinct was to tip the bucket into the flower bed and let him go. Kind of like when you catch a hummingbird in the house, and all you want to do is turn it loose. But it occurred to me that he might like some water, some suet dough, and a bing cherry. I sure would, if I'd been in a plastic bucket all night and morning, plonking away, eating the few moth-eaten sunflower seeds that remained stuck in it.

Oh, yes, thank you VERY much. I would like that.
He tied into the suet dough the second it landed in the bucket. And put a hurtin' on the cherry.
Sweet mousie. I hope you've enjoyed your stay in Hotel Rubbermaid. Now stay the ***** out of my dryer lint trap*

*whose stench is slowly receding into a more acceptable composty smell. I hang the clothes out all summer anyway. I figure by October, I ought to be able to tumble clothes in there without having them come out smelling of my new fabric softener scent, Corpse. Prince and Britney have their own fragrances. Why not the Science Chimp?