Sanosuke caught a second mouse. I grabbed the camera, but the lighting is very dark. Sorry!
What you didn’t see, was when I tried to take it from him. When I finally got the courage to try and take it away, Sano flipped the mouse right at me.
The mouse theme has ended, for a while at least! Unless I find one waiting for me in my bed..
Surrounded by farm land, and
Open fields of untouched soil
Winter is cold wet and frozen
Spring brings a thaw of rains, and
Flood waters and open creeks
Those swell to streams
And then…they come into the house
One mouse in the house Two mice in the garage Three mice in the barnHow tempting a treat to a cat
Hawk or coyote
In a pet shop
You are worth a couple of dollars
To me your cost is closer to a thousand
To fix the damage, when
You, you tiny rodent
built a condo inside my car
Within the air ducts and around the engine
One mouse in the house Two mice in the garage Three mice in the barnTime for Feisty Sanosuke, Kenshin, and PJ
To play with those Sweet little mice
In the garage,
Furry and fat scamper off my walls
I hear your nails scratching, and
your teeth gnawing
Your days are numbered
One mouse in the house Two mice in the garage Three mice in the barnI have to insist, give up your license
To my car, and my house
Your cash is shredded in this years nest
And plastic is not accepted
So run, run little furry mouse
Sanosuke, Kenshin and PJ want to play,
Tomoe just wants to watch
I will set out sticky traps
And search in every corner
One mouse in the house Two mice in the garage Three mice in the barnAre just one too many mice in my life…
Picture from clip art;
It was two AM on Tuesday. I woke up to the cats boisterously running through the hallway and sliding into the bedroom. They bumped into the bed, the walls, and the vertical blinds. I rolled over and drifted back to sleep.
Michael sat up and started talking, “I wonder what’s going on?”
Without looking I muttered, “They’re just playing behind the vertical blinds”
Michael crawled out of bed and carefully stepped in front of the bed, searching the shadows. “No! Something’s up.”
He came around my side of the bed and flipped on the light. “Look at Sano?”
I sat up and Sano was sitting all pretty and proud with a mouse dangling from his mouth.
“It’s fake!” I muttered and tried to lie back down.
“No, that is real” Michael laughed and Sano nodded his head so the mouse, who was being held by his tail, swung upward then came down and was hit against the rug.
Sano’s eyes narrowed; when Tomoe walked up to him and sniffed the mouse, which I need to point out was very much alive. Then Sano growled.
Tomoe glared at Sano as if she wanted to smack him. Michael immediately told me to do something about that growl.
Sorry, I have had one too many mice dropped on my chest while I slept. I am not fond of the critters. To show how much of a chicken I am, I pulled the covers over my head and told Sano to stop growling and take the mouse to his brothers, downstairs.
Instead Sano dropped the mouse. The mouse ran in a circle. Tomoe hates getting bitten so she stood a healthy distance away and just watched.
Sano played with the very fat grey and white mouse like he was playing a pinball game. He wouldn’t allow the mouse to run under the dressers, but he did let him disappear under the bed. The one I was cowering on.
I jumped out of bed and ran in a circle flapping my arms yelling at Michael, “Get that mouse out of the bedroom!” Then I headed out into the hall and called Kenshin and PJ. They recognized my frantic, Oh my! A mouse is in the house! Hysterical call and ran up the stairs to see what they were missing.
With the two older males now trying to find the mouse, I crawled back under the covers. Tomoe crouched on the edge of the bed, hanging over the side and stared at the floor and at Sano, who was carefully scooting out backwards from under the bed.
Michael muttered something I couldn’t understand. So I peeked out from beneath the blanket. He held Sano up for me to see. Sano had that mouse clenched in-between his teeth and once more swinging by its tail. Michael held Sano over the waste basket, and asked Sano to “drop it” -the mouse- into the wastebasket. Michael had to repeat his request three times before Sano opened his jaws and the fat mouse plopped into the plastic bag.
Sano was confused as to where his mouse went to and searched franticly with Kenshin and PJ’s help under and around the bed. Tomoe kept an eye on Michael and followed him out if the bedroom.
At this point, that mouse was out of my sight and I hoped Michael had given him a first class ticket to the moon…
Or, maybe toss him out the door.
The last mouse that was tossed out the door had been caught in a sticky mouse trap. Michael was afraid the cats would get into the garbage and get stuck in the glue. So he had chucked that sticky mess out the door. He figured on scraping it off the grass in the morning. Instead it landed right in the path of a coyote. Yapping loudly, that coyote raced across the fields with a rectangular piece of plastic and a struggling mouse stuck to his nose…
Picture from word clip art..The past few days the weather has been up and down, sideways and in circles.
Last night we had pouring rain, thunder and dangerous lightening. During the first part of that storm I was outside, walking as close to the house as I could get, while I tried to encourage Uriah to do his business in a hurry. Nothing hurries Uriah. I stood back and watched the dark sky light up emphasizing the jagged edges of the high Cumulonimbus clouds. A rolling rumble vibrated underneath my feet and still Uriah sniffed at the edge of the Blue Spruce, unperturbed. It was only when I told him to get in the house that he started to whine. He hates thunderstorms, but Uriah’s idea of safety during a storm is to stand out in the open and stare up into the electrified sky.
On Sunday, when the path was still a path, severe winds blew over a tree. Fortunately I wasn’t out there when it happened. I never made it though the back yard, even attempting to make my way to the back path was impossible. The winds were irritatingly loud! I couldn’t see past my hair, no matter how hard I tried, and at one point I thought I saw Miss Gulch pedaling over head, followed closely by that Pheasant, and That Rat. With each step I fought to move forward. I could have tied a rope to Uriah and flew him like a kite. Alright, a fat, pudgy unhappy kite…
Today the path is underwater and the air is so heavy I was feeling out of sorts, dizzy, sneezing, and hard to breathe I am moving very, very slow. On the bright side the toads are croaking loudly and the mosquitoes are out and biting. Hmmm!
Back to the tree! In order for me to remove that tree I will need to use the tractor, and ‘she’ is still asleep covered in blankets in the barn.
I stood back and paced out the distance from the beginning of the path to the downed tree, sixty steps. Not good! Last year we had a tree fall over and it was only a fraction of the distance, and a forth the size. Taking the tractor in that area would set me up for disaster with all that soft wet mud under the large wheels. If I stood in the mud I would sink in. If I add a tractor with spinning wheels and an idiot driving (me) … Well, the tractor will sink deep in the mud, and at that point I will need to call someone in to pull it out.
Still I stood there and thought about it…
If I used the tractor I will need a very long chain that I can connect to the tree, and the tractor. All the while crossing my fingers, that both will hold on the first attempt. They never do! One side or both will slip off and have to be reconnected, while I’m left standing in the thick black, oozing mud.
I considered leaving the tree and cutting a path around it..hmmm! I have a chain saw, sort of. Michael hid it somewhere, so that idea might not work.
Today isn’t the day to work out the technicalities, too much water and a lack of diesel, and a hidden chainsaw.
Last resort… Woodpeckers! Eventually they would pound holes in that tree allowing it to fall apart. I’m voting for the birds.
In the meantime, Uriah walked around the tree…
Sanosuke’s first bunny rabbit! A picture is worth a thousand words!
Four
pictures
are
priceless.
Pussy, pussy pussycat 
Playing with the
Pussy, pussy Pussy Willows
Pushing pulling at the soft tips
Knocking off their nails
Grabbing the branch and tipping the vase
Making for a perfect Pussy Willow race
Across the kitchen floor, under the rugs
Swept up in the fun of a catkins chase
Slipping, sliding bouncing off the walls
Finally tuckered out and surrounded
By Pussy Willow tails
The pussy, pussycat
Falls into his catnap garden
Chasing his dreams with
Pussy Willow sticks
When I took these pictures, I had to keep telling Sano, “don’t touch!” As soon as I put away the camera he knocked over the vase and started playing. The vase is on the floor because no one would stay away from it as it sat on the table. Safer on the floor! Poem for Jingles Thursday’s poet Rally:-)
Roll me an egg across the fresh garden grass
Speckled with colors blues and greens, reds and yellows
Hidden among the daffodils, crocus and tulips
Set inside the stiffen arm of a tree
I move and stretch, warmth courses into my bones
I watch Persephone walk by with her mother
Passing on the light of color and warmth
Dressed in a ruffled dress of buds and flowers
Lilacs resting in her hair rose buds at her feet
Small hands collecting the painted eggs
Hidden beneath the dried grass and emerging life
Her touch awakening colors
That spreads like golden water ahead of her footfall
As her basket fills, so does the air
With sound and scents and vibrant warmth
Roll me an egg across the darkening sky
The first full moon of spring, hearken
Persephone walks with her mother
Yesterday and this morning I took my walk looking up. The trees are just starting to bud. And the flowers are just beginning to show their colors.
The ground is littered with dried left over leaves, brittle and grayish brown, crunching under foot. Even as the grass makes an attempt to turn green, as the moss pulls on its most brilliant lime green coat of the season. The main show is taking place above ground; branches are turning colors as spring moves through them. Don’t miss the show!
“In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours.” ~Mark Twain
Within the past two hours, I have seen heavy fog, thick dark grey clouds, and a bright blue sky, that shifted to a pale whitish-blue.
A bellowing cloud of smoke passed through my house as the farmer burned off the dried grass around the creek bed. The thick heavy smoke made it a little uncomfortable to breathe. So Uriah and I headed off to the mail box and I took pictures of the blooming, Pussy Willow as Uriah disappeared to wade in the pond.
Uriah came back out of the cold pond and pulled his fat tummy across the grass, this is his way of toweling himself off…
Why is it
when the air cools
I can feel the past,
I shiver and sigh…
The sun rose slowly, over a humid, cool and very clear moment. The air was still. I watched as two dozen Robins pacing out the yard. I was an interloper into their world, for this moment, they let me stay.
I gripped my hot coffee cup, held it close and stared out over the empty field. The sun was hidden behind the clouds that sat on the horizon, I looked up the sky was shifting to a sleepy blue above me, without a slip of a cloud.
This time of day holds loosely to a cool silence. Where nature is kind and allows us to wake up slowly as nocturnal animals drift off to sleep.
I use to walk out in this quiet, barefoot. I would step easily around and over rocks and spiders. It is the spiders that are awake; they weave and repair their webs all night catching insects unawares in the darkness. Now those webs shimmer with icy dewdrops and I stay on the deck.
I was a perfect stuffed monkey 
Reddish fur with a beige tummy
face and feet
Until an animal got to me
Now, I lie here without arms, legs or ears
Even my tail was chewed off…
Maybe it was coyote
A raccoon
A fox
or possibly… a skunk
Could have been that rat
That rat
That steals Uriah’s food and rawhide bones
That rat
that digs the holes around the kennel
under the garden, and
tunnels alongside the horseradish plant
One day the hawk will come by, and sit
Quietly on the railing
waiting for that rat to make a mistake
when he is dancing
on the top of the kennel
Just under the floor boards of the deck
He will scramble up
to look in the kitchen window
at that point, the hawk will strike…
And that rat will be no more
To late for me, I lie here without arms,
or legs, and ears… even my tail is gone
I have all the time in the world
To wonder
Now what..?
Check out everyone at Jingles Thursday poets rally-
http://jingleyanqiu.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/thursday-poets-rally-week-11-march-24-30-2010/
