One day while the kids were hanging out in the living room, they noticed Stanky running about in a particularly frisky manner. Soon they noticed that he had a mouse in his mouth. He put it down in front of the television and proceeded to play with it, as cats are wont to do. The kids called for me (or did they scream for me?). I raced downstairs and trapped the mouse so that Stanky wouldn't do any further damage to it. While it's one thing to clean up a dead mouse, it's an entirely other thing to clean up mouse parts.
A few days later, we awoke to find another dead mouse in front of the tv. Shirra cleaned the pantry carefully (finding an open bag of cheese crackers in the process), and we hoped that our mouse-finding days were over. At this point, I should mention that Shirra is deathly phobic about mice. She had some as a kid, but when they began to breed, her parents realized that the petshop owner had erroneously sold them two mice of different sexes. Shirra's parents apparently took this to mean that they weren't fated to own mice. They took the mice back to the petshop. Shirra later discovered that her pets had been sold as snake food. The phobia began.
When we lived in Manhattan, some of our neighborhoods were a bit trashier than others. That is, they were abounding in actual trash. The toughest place for her to live was our 114th Street apartment because it was down the street from a popular church that had a popular soup kitchen. Garbage bags regularly appeared on the curb outside this house of worship, but what really brought out the rats was the abandoned building across the street. Rats used to race over to the garbage bags, grab some munchies, and race back to their squathouse. When the garbage bags were out at night, we had to run past them to reduce Shirra's chances of spotting any rats, and when did spot a rat, she needed a few moments to gather her wits and control her breathing.
We went to Manhattan this past weekend, returning late last night. As Shirra and I unloaded the car, Emmett noticed a gift from Stanky. Our beloved cat had caught two mice during our absense and had laid them out parallel in his gift-spot two feet from the tv, as tho they had died while watching an especially boring show. Unfortunately, Shirra was in the room when the discovery was made. She immediately began hyperventilating, but she held her shit together until I made some joke about the mice (something about a particularly boring show on tv), and at that point she had to rush to the bathroom so that the kids wouldn't see her cry. Of course, this made Maeve wonder where mommy was. Within minutes, all of the kids were crying too: the girls at the site of their mother's tears, and Emmett because someone's elbow had jammed his eye while he was running to take care of his mom.
As usual, Shirra managed to compose herself almost instantly, and the night continued pretty much as normal. She found a lot of mouse poop near the sink today, however, and announced, "I guess they've hunkered down here for the winter. Great." She also announced that so long as we live in the country, we can never be without a cat.
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