The Dead Mouse

When I was a child, I adored field mice. I would rescue them from the cat and doctor them up. ICU was our bathroom and the recovery room was a shoebox in my bedroom. I would put fluffed up cotton balls in there for a comfy bed, and milk-soaked white bread in an upsidedown jar cover for nourishment. Many a mouse had nine lives in our house.

One morning I found the cutest mouse ever, already dead, in the driveway. This mouse was a chocolatey brown color with soft fur. He had something really special about him I had never seen before... the most amazing black wings fitted right to his little arms. He must have been an angel mouse.

I scooped him up and ran him right to the front door to show my mother. To say that she screamed would be an understatement. You would think I had delivered the devil to her. “Get rid of it, don’t touch it, drop it.... It’s a BAAAAAT!!!”

I have no idea what my six or seven year old self did with that dead bat... the memory ends there on the cement steps with me trying to understand why my darling dead mouse was so horrible.

Fast forward many years... I found another “mouse with wings” in my driveway...



Ahhhh, I get it now.

I have been trying to figure out if the mouse/bat in my memory really did look like this one. How could I have thought he was adorable? Sometimes I really miss that schema-less little girl.