Renaming inanimate objects; a family pastime
Sweet Pea was making some weird sounds the other night, sometime after midnight.
She would usually be asleep on my feet, so hearing a guttural, twisted mewling from outside the partly closed door could only mean one thing.
Mouse. Again. Sigh.
I got up silently and crept down the hall toward the noise. She was making a little grinding noise deep in her throat, so I followed the sound, hating that life with cats is snuggles and gentle kneading but also moments like this. I pushed open the bathroom door.
She looked up at me, her mouth full of mouse. If I scared her she would take off and I’d be competing in an F1 race around my house with a freaked-out cat clamped onto a more freaked-out mouse. “Pea,” I hissed. “Drop it.”
She looked up at me with huge grey eyes, knew she had no escape route, and dropped the wee creature on the bath mat. My new white bath mat. It was dead but intact, for which I was grateful.
Pea bolted out of the room — game, set match — and I said a quiet ashes to ashes as I gently folded the bath mat — my new white bath mat — around the inert form of the unlucky mouse, and dumped the whole bundle on the front step to be dealt with in the morning.
Under my breath, I muttered something about why a mouse would dodge the humane traps I have out, their expensive ticket to freedom.
When I was about eight, I dropped a mitten down the outhouse at the cottage.
The problem was that it was an expensive mitten, not a homemade one that mom could replace in half an hour with the clickety-clack of her knitting needles. A storebought mitten.
I was scared to tell my parents, but of course I did. We were up north, it was freezing, and I only had one mitten. My father immediately set about retrieving my mitten. You wonder why my soul is slightly dented.
It didn’t matter how many ways my mother told me she’d cleaned, sanitized, disinfected or boiled that mitten. It was the “Outhouse Mitten.”
I never wore it again, throwing out the other one at school one day. Mom was quietly on my side, but store-bought mittens were expensive and we both knew my father would never let it go if he had a visual reminder of the Outhouse Mitten. It obviously scarred me — I can still describe that mitten.
Driving back from the cottage another time, one of my sisters had to pee. We were only a few blocks from home and my father refused to pull over. “Sit on a towel,” he yelled into the rear-view mirror.
My mother grabbed a beach towel from the laundry bag and told her to sit on it for a minute. This, of course, horrified me.
Nothing happened, but that would remain “Pee Towel” forever and nobody wanted to use it anymore. I also learned a valuable lesson to teach my own kids or longdistance travel companions: if you have to stop, tell the driver what number you’re at.
“I’m a three” means you have 10 minutes; “I’m a nine” means you should have told me when you were a three. “I’m a 10” means you’re lucky I’m not my dad. I will pull over and not make you pee on a towel.
One time Christer had an exuberant night out with his friends and came home over-refreshed. He proceeded to throw up all over his new zebra area rug. He’d also eaten an entire bag of Cheetos. I just threw the whole thing out because I was not going to be my dad and make him live with the “Barf Carpet.”
Even as I now have to live with the “Dead Mouse Bath Mat.”