Ok, so this isn’t your usual blue moment, but it’s interesting none-the-less.

I was woken up in the middle of the night last night, by this eerie, wet, and unusually loud hissing noise coming from my cat.  Usually, when my cat hisses, I think it’s incredibly cute, because it’s more of a deep breath out, like he can’t really make the noise, but this was a bizzare and, well, oogie-type sound.  I reached over and clumsily turned on the lamp on my bedside table, and of course, I saw the last thing I wanted to see in the middle of the night – my cat, with a live mouse (it’s tail was twitching) hanging out of his mouth, in the middle of my bedroom floor.

I find my reaction to seeing mice as an adult interesting.  When I was younger, I truly lived among the rodents.  My mother’s house sat in the middle of a field, across the road from a barn, and just because of that our house was often infested with mice during the changing of the seasons.  She now keeps cats on hand to keep that problem in check, and it works!  But, none the less, while I was growing up, I’d emptied numerous mouse-traps out in the field, I found a dead mouse in my dresser, mixed in among some clothing, had a dead one stuck in our oven for months, until it’s carcass was cooked enough to not smell anymore, and was even faced with the dilemma of bludgeoning to death of some baby mice found in a storage box in our basement (I didn’t.)

In light of this history, at 1:30 am this morning, I found myself standing on my bed, barely containing the screeching sound so often portrayed in cartoons, while telling my cat to get out OUT! of my bedroom.  My cat doesn’t tend to listen very well, so instead of getting out OUT! of my bedroom, he decided to play with the mouse – letting it go and pouncing on it, and tossing it around with his mouth, until finally the mouse ran out of the bedroom and the cat happily followed it, at which point I slammed the door closed on it, and stuffed a sweatshirt underneath the door, so if the mouse were so inclined, it wouldn’t be able to run underneath the door to get away from the cat.

I don’t know why adult women are often portrayed as being afraid of mice.  I know why I didn’t like the idea of it running around my house last night, and it only has partly to do with the fact that I wasn’t wearing underwear (you know the old story – wear underwear to bed so that they don’t crawl up into your vagina).  While that is a freaky-enough thought, I was more concerned about it running over my toes – a distinctly un-appealing thought.  Mice are DIRTY!  They carry germs, and I just plain don’t want any part of a mouse touching any part of me – bare or not.  In fact, I was very tempted to take up the rug in the bathroom – which is where the cat commenced playing – to wash it, because undoubtedly, the mouse touched it.

In any case, the cat must have lost his mouse, and I think it was in the bathroom radiator, because he seemed particularly fascinated with that area this morning after I did finally wake up.