Really, Most Sincerely Dead

This morning, after I had drank (drunk?) one cup of coffee (or maybe two), I got dressed and then went to the grocery store in the next town over. On the way home, I stopped at the grain elevator at the end of our street to buy some cat and dog food. After I got the groceries unloaded and put away, I made a quick lunch for my guys and then brought in firewood. I knew that the weather was supposed to turn nasty so I wanted to get all my tasks done.

Poor Danny didn’t get his walk today because as EJ was leaving for work, I saw that the wind was blowing hard…like the wolf in the story of The Three Little Pigs.  The wind huffed and it puffed and it blew the leaves off the trees in a golden shower. It also began to rain quite hard. I said, “Sorry, Danny, not today.” Later in the afternoon it began to snow. It actually snowed harder than I expected…but not enough to stick to the ground.

Tonight was Halloween. The weather was cold and damp and snowy and very windy.

I remember how much fun I had as a child dressing up in costumes and going trick-or-treating for candy. As an adult, I became aware of the darker side to the holiday. I think the meanings of holidays matter. It’s been “tricky” knowing how to deal with the holiday. If we lived in the country, I would have chosen to ignore it altogether, but we live in town and hundreds of children pass by our house. When JJ was little, I often chose to give out candy in order to reach out to the children in the neighborhood. Sometimes we have invited relatives over and had a movie night. In recent years, JJ and I have turn off all the lights and hidden from all the monsters and witches and princesses walking by our house as we snack on candy and chips in the dark. I bought a bag of candy–assorted Reeses and Hershey candy bars–this morning when I went to the store. I was appalled at how expensive a bag of candy was. If we were giving out candy, we could easily have spent hundreds of dollars. Yikes.

We have one family–friends of ours–who stops by each year and we give them a handful of our candy. We choose not to act all nasty and hostile if people celebrate holidays that we don’t. This year their little three-year-old panda ran around the house chasing our cats. Our cats are not used to three-year-old pandas so they ran helter skelter around the house and then they hid.

Yesterday evening the cats caught a mouse. I always wait until the mice are “not only merely dead, but really, most sincerely dead” before I sweep them up into a dustpan and throw them outside. I don’t want to risk a mouse climbing on me. JJ said he was sure the mouse was dead, but I couldn’t find it. Then the cats caught another mouse, which they played with until it was really most sincerely dead and then I threw it out. I was not sure if the cats had caught one mouse or two. This morning. I found the second mouse, however, and I threw it outside.

Our house was mostly dark tonight because we were hiding from the little monsters going from door to door begging for candy. On my way to the kitchen, I saw a candy wrapper on the floor. I reached down to pick it up. It was a DEAD MOUSE. EWWWWW! I yelled and then ran out into the kitchen and washed my hands with soap and then with sanitizer while JJ laughed at me. I swept the mouse into dustpan and threw it outside. Then I washed my hands again.  I’m still traumatized by touching the third dead mouse.

I think the mice are moving into the house to get away from the nasty weather. Thank goodness we have cats.