Field of Bones…

My mother’s squeals of dismay could be heard all the way out to the back yard where my brother and I were building an underground fort (story for a different time).  We dropped our shovels and made for where the sounds erupted, the living room.  As we ran into the house, we were met with a scene reminiscent of an unearthed graveyard, in rodent form…

Let me back up a bit, as I am sure you are confused by the scene about to unfold.  One must always provide context, so as not to panic the masses.  I want to take you back some months prior to the event (approximately 3), to early spring in our part of Eastern Oregon (still a bit chilly).    We had suffered a long Saturday of errands, with the grown ups barely noticing what us kids were doing while they shopped.  This sort of serves them right, if you’re asking…

Amidst their distraction, while at the local farm supply store, my brother and I took it upon ourselves to liberate the entire supply of baby pinky mice from the tanks in the back. 

All we had to do, was tear open the back of our pockets, inside our fluffy coats.  We quickly grabbed handfuls of baby mice of differing ages, not caring about anything but escape.  We felt like hero’s…  climbing obediently into the back of the station wagon, with the picture of innocence on our faces, being careful not to lean back to hard in our seats.  We didn’t have to worry about seatbelts back then, our parents figured we could hold on.

Success was our middle name, so of course, we simply kept all the babies in our coats.  Then we pilfered food out of the pantry, to shove in our pockets. It took effort to zip our pockets back up before the little beans escaped.  This worked for the whole night, so when Sunday arrived, we headed off to church wearing the very coats from the day before.  That was, in honesty, the only time that I ever really had a good time on a Sunday morning, as far as my childhood went.  My brother and I both sat in silence, sharing conspiratorial glances, as we spent a full two hours with our hands in our coat pockets.

We actually kept those mice, undetected, inside our coats for at least a week, before it started to smell bad.  It was at this point that we decided, my brother and I, to release the little angels underneath our beds… surely, they would find there way to freedom from there, right…

From there it was out of sight, out of mind, on our part…

Well, the day of the scream was the day of reckoning, we thought…  But we were somehow miraculously spared of any blame, as my mother was so upset that her precious couch had been invaded by vermin, she never once looked closely enough at all of the skeletal remains, to see that they were all babies… when I look back, I realize that if the grown ups never noticed the coats smelling like a dirty outhouse for a week, they would never even notice the guilty looks of horror on our small faces…

So, again I say, it serves em right!

** I would like to take this time to assure you, no mice were harmed during the reenactment of this memory, and we cannot be held liable for accidental death and dismemberment that may or may not have occurred during our tiny years. **

Cheese anyone…