Fearless Me

I drug my son up to the attic last night in search of Christmas boxes. It is always a major undertaking because first of all I have no direct access to the attic, just a hole in the ceiling with a panel over it and the fact that I have 20 some boxes of Christmas decorations.

So I carried the ladder in, set it up, pulled myself through the crawl hole in the ceiling and began handing boxes down to my son. Everything went well until I found the dead mouse. I did not know that it was dead when I first saw it, it looked like it was laying in wait for me ... just waiting for me to bend down so it could spring for my jugular vein and wrestle me to the floor. But after running around in circles screaming, "Mouse! Mouse!" it still had not moved. That is when my son came up and pronounced it dead.

Being absolutely fearless in the face of certain doom, I turned to my son and said, "If you love your mother you will dispose of the mouse." So being the big strong brave man that he is, he turned to me and said .... "Uh do you have some pliers or something I can pick it up with?" So I went and got the pliers from his tool bag. (I was not going to let him use mine for that) I got a plastic garbage bag and stood at the foot of the ladder waiting for him to come down and use the bag to dispose of the mouse. About then his head popped through the ceiling and I looked up to see dead mouse dropping from the attic. At that point my body hijacked the rest of me and went screaming to the other end of the house.

By the time my son got down the ladder and came in search of me, I was hiding behind the couch. He looked at me and said, "You moved the bag .... if you had stayed still the mouse would have dropped in the bag." I pulled myself up to every one of my 4 foot 11inches and said, "You dropped a dead mouse on me!" while giving him the kind of look that only a mother can give. He vehemently denied it but went and fished the dead mouse out from where it had fallen and disposed of it in the outside garbage can.

He still insists that he was aiming for the bag, and is sticking with his story. As for me ... I am thinking that at some point I must have dropped him on his head as a baby, because there is nothing in our history as mother and son that should have made him think I would stand there with aplomb while a dead mouse was hurtling towards my head.

I am also thinking ..... that next year I send him up to the attic first.

Just Connie