A Proven Fact

Have you ever seen those old movies/pictures of the women who spent their day in a dress, high heels, and wore pearls as they cleaned the house? You know, the women who looked glorious as they did every task?

Well, you may well remember that those same women had a tendency to be famous for something else.

Every time they saw a mouse in their house, they would grab their skirts and leap onto the nearest chair. Screaming.

I always laughed at that whenever I saw it. "No one does that." I argued. "How archaic." Right? Wrong.

Recently, a mouse (or possibly mice) have taken up residence in the walls of our basement apartment. Don't ask me how. I have no idea. All I know is that I had a heck of a time convincing my husband I heard scratching coming from the hall closet a week or so ago. Especially because a few days later, he cleared every single object from the closet and found nothing.

Days went by without any sign and I started to relax. I was content to be considered a loon who heard scratching noises instead of a woman who has actual mice in her house. Well, the Lord has a sense of humor, of that I'm sure.

I was crawling into bed last night at about 2:45 am. I laid my head of my pillow and thought I heard the familiar scratching noise right behind my head. I froze. I don't even think I blinked. I was waiting to hear it again so I could text my husband (who was at work) and say, "HA! I TOLD you so!" I didn't hear anything, so I began to relax. That was until I heard squeaking.

I think I jumped a foot off the bed.

"I couldn't have just heard squeaking. That's too much. We don't actually have mice in our walls, do we?! Come on..." Cue more scratching. Then came some scurrying. The mouse must have been pissed at something or someone because he sure had a lot to squeak about. It is no minor miracle I ever fell asleep last night. I kept waiting for a mouse to fall onto the bed from the ledge above my head.

I kept visualizing things like that, which I'll be the first to tell you, did NOT aide me in going to sleep. I pictured grabbing the box of rice out of the pantry and having half of it spill onto the floor from the little hole that had been chewed in the bottom.

Then, if that wasn't bad enough, I imagined that the mouse was still in the box. Suffice it to say that in my mind, I dropped that box faster than you thought humanly possible and immediately dove for the kitchen chair like an Olympic pole vaulter.

So I'm here to tell you that the women I once scoffed at for being so chicken as to stand on a chair to avoid a mouse were wise beyond my years. I might as well start cleaning the house in pantyhose because I'm more like these iconic women than I realized. :)