Obviously the long hours spent alone while working from home have started to affect my brain.  I rescued a mouse today on my afternoon run.  A mouse.  He was lying in the middle of the sidewalk dragging one leg behind him while making this terrible twitching motion.  His beady little eyes imploring me to do something.  Using a twig and a paper cup (litterers!) I managed to move him off the sidewalk and under the shade of a bush.  He didn’t seem too happy with me for moving him but the thought of someone else coming by on their afternoon run and squishing him to death were a little more than I could handle. 

Normally, I would not consider myself the rescuer of feeble-injured-cute-things type.  However, mice have a special place in my heart.  Particularly a little mouse I bought at the pet shop when I was 16 and dubbed Karl Marx.  I let that mouse sleep with me and sit on my leg while I read or watched TV.  When little Karl died after only three weeks I gave him a private burial in my parents front yard with a heartrending eulogy cursing the bourgeois and the effects of commodity fetishism.  (And you wonder why I’m afraid to have a child of my own.)  In short, I really loved him. 

So, today I ran home and called the Southerner to ask him if I should go back to the bush where I placed the mouse and bring him home with me, expecting full well to be told HELL NO and then go and do it anyway.  Instead, the Southerner (because he is the best most wonderful man on the face of the earth) told me that if leaving the mouse behind made me feel bad I should get a shoebox and bring him home.  He also told me to wash my hands A LOT. 

We don’t have any shoeboxes so I frantically searched the entire house for a makeshift mouse infirmary.  Taco-shells box? No.  Tampon box? How humiliating.  I settled for an egg crate carton and ran back to the mouse’s location.  Getting him the mile back to the house was a delicate mission.  Wellington nature trail preserver people are trying to eradicate mice and possums, and here I am carrying an egg carton at arm’s length with a little dish cloth covering it and trying very hard not to look suspicious.  But, we made it! So far he seems to be doing a little better and I got him to drink some milk soaked in a shoestring.  I can’t bring myself to give him a name yet since he might still die and if he doesn’t, I highly doubt I will get to keep him, but wouldn’t be great to have someone else to talk to during the day other than myself? A girl can dream.