Eye to eye with the mouse in the cupboard, my Aunt Vi promptly shrieked, Lord have mercy! and immediately fainted.
Now what? my grandmother grumbled as she removed a baking pan of cherry tarts from the ancient oven and placed it on the counter, What is it, Vi?
There was a low moan from the pantry and Nana impatiently made her way to the small room off the kitchen. Mouse! my Aunt Vi whispered from the floor where she was cowering against a cabinet, white faced and wide eyed.
Viola, my grandmother said wearily, I swear you faint at the drop of a hat!
There was no mouse to be seen by then although the bag of sugar he'd been nibbling on showed tiny but distinct teeth marks and there were smudged tracks in the spilled sugar. Nana, spatula in hand and prepared to do battle to the death, flung open each and every cupboard door, but the little rodent, wise in the ways of cupboard living, had long since fled. Nana added cheese and mouse traps to her shopping list and before sending me off to McIntyre's gave me a stern warning, Not a word of this to your mother or I'll tan your hide! I'll never get her into the pantry again if she thinks a mouse might be waiting! With the dogs at my heels, I trotted off, already scheming about mice and my mother, plotting ways to put them together without getting caught.
You see, my grandmother explained later, You bait the trap with cheese - the mouse snatches it and the trap springs and breaks his nasty little neck.
I had no particular feelings about mice but I was horrified at this savage prospect. Why can't we catch him and let him go? I asked.
Nana frowned and gave me a disapproving look. Because he'd just come back, she said a trifle impatiently, And he'd bring friends and they'd bring friends and in no time we'd be overrun. She softened just a little when I began to cry.
You have to understand - with mice, it's them or us. There's no other way and besides, it's very quick, practically painless.
Looking at the deadly little wooden traps, I had my doubts but I shouldn't have worried for after several days and all the traps having been sprung, not a single mouse had been executed. Nana set the traps each night and removed them each morning before my mother could stumble upon them, but there were no tiny mouse corpses. Sometimes the bits of cheese were gone and sometimes they weren't - it seemed our mouse was a clever little creature, probably with some experience in the area of mousetraps. Nothing! my grandmother would disgustedly mutter as she collected the empty traps. She disliked being outsmarted by a mouse.
The great mouse hunt came to a sad and surprising end one foggy summer morning. Nana had made a fresh batch of cherry tarts and left them to cool on the kitchen counter while she made the beds. My mother rounded the corner of the room with a bundle of clean clothes in one hand and the old iron in the other - when she saw the mouse up to his whiskers in the cherry tarts, she reacted not with her usual panic and screams, but with one dead on pitch of the old iron - it caught the mouse squarely on the head and the poor thing tumbled into the tarts, dead as a doornail. Only then did my mother let loose with full blown hysteria, collapsing on the floor in a pile of pillow cases and wailing at the top of her lungs.
Nana and I buried the mouse (and most of the cherry tarts) beside the blackberry brambles while my mother looked on from a a safe distance away. We had no more trouble with mice that summer, Nana ordered a new iron from latest Spiegel's catalogue, and my mother - who had so loved cherry tarts - gave them up for life.
Thinking will not overcome fear but action will.
W. Clement Stone
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