A waning moon outside, the children in bed, and my work is done.
The fruit flies have evolved, there's a swarm of them in the bathroom - perhaps I mistook the compost for their home, maybe the workmen downstairs have left a body...it's beginning to resemble something out a Damien Hirst exhibition.
There's a Mouse in the House
Which is odd, it's a ragged old mouse, long tail, dirty coat, but it made it's presence known almost immediately after I moved in.
Which is odd, because I've had a mouse before...
Before moving to Cochrane, in my Calgary apartment, as something for the children to marvel at, I caught a baby mouse on a rare jog and brought it home. Leaving it in a shoebox, there was no way it could escape...
But it did, and for a month I saw nothing of it, and thought that it had met it's end in a box of detergent, or behind a bookshelf someplace.
It didn't. And from time to time I'd see it, leaving it scraps of food on the counter, see it crawl through the drawers, on the ledge above the fireplace, find stores of macaroni and seeds, little mouse turds masquerading as berries in the blueberry pancakes.
We tried to catch it a few times, always in the summer, to relocate it back to it's field before winter came. It wasn't interested. And so it became a part of the family.
When we moved to Cochrane I searched long and hard for it, hoping to trap it and release it. Not a sign, it had vanished, even moving the fridge, it's favorite hiding spot, no mouse to be found.
In Cochrane the children and I missed it, wondered as to it's fate, if the next tenants would be as tolerant as us...
But in Cochrane there were signs as well, a few months in, chewed paper began turning up in an old hoosier I had brought with me, then little piles of cat food, hidden away in corners. Perhaps the mouse had packed itself along?
We never saw it there, little wonder, we had 2 cats in the kitchen. But there were the occasional droppings found in the carpet, the hidden stashes of nuts and food gathered from floors and cupboards.
And moving again, this time my belongings packed for me and left in a garage, a new place, and a mouse.
It strains credulity that this could be the same mouse, it would be almost 4 years old now, very old for a mouse. But a loyal mouse, following the steady supply of crumbs left by the children, a feast for a plague of mice, for one mouse a kingdom.
I like to think it's the same mouse, when I see it steal out from behind the fridge, a couple of times I've caught glimses of it's tail under the bookshelves in the office, it's family now. Our mouse.