Mice & a Valentine

Photo by Rachel Walker on Unsplash

Mice outside in the feed shed are easy. I use a bucket with a tiny ladder attached and peanut butter smeared around the rim of the bucket. The mice climb the ladder to slurp on the PB, the trap door opens like in the movies or Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl extravaganza and the mice fall into a mouse group home. I take the bucket out to the field, remove the lid and tell them to never come back. The cats watch and note the mice dispersion.

The inside mice are wireless to Ray’s and my computers. My computer mouse went rogue a while ago and its cursor preferred the top left corner of my screen. I would scroll it down to where I wanted it and it would jitter away always top left.

Try a different mouse I said. I found Ray’s mouse, polished to a patina from use, pulled its dongle from his computer and plugged it into mine. Top left corner again. I cleaned both mouse belly buttons, and changed their batteries using new/old batteries from a drawer in Ray’s office, which was a cowboy kitchen in the early days. There is a bank of kitcheny drawers and I can never remember which one holds the batteries. Some of the drawers are stuck shut.

Before it occurred to me to go to the hardware store to buy fresh batteries I tried a wired mouse on Ray’s computer. It stayed in its lane and moved at my command. I was relieved at its compliance because trouble shooting mice and magazine publishing deadlines don’t mix even if all that’s required is a trip to the hardware store.

It felt good to sit where Ray sat, to stroke the keys especially the ones with the letters worn off. After finishing a magazine article on his computer I wandered into his Documents and scrolled to Poems where I found three he had written to me. One of them is a Valentine.