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Yuk - A Mouse !!
By Brigitta Vetter
Like most kids I had my share of cats - kittens which I brought home from the country - when the farmer's wife said - if you don't take it, I'll just drown them. My Mom was never pleased with what I brought home in pets - but she tolerated them - although they were not allowed in the house. As soon as the kittens turned around 6 or 9 months old and started wandering around, they never returned - most of them were run over by cars. When I started secondary school, we got a real dog - an Alsation puppy. All of us 3 children adored him - and he even got along well with my occasional kittens - they slept together, he allowed her to eat from his food.
But the most vivid remembrance I have - when still in primary school - I had 2 white mice. My mother hated mice and she said clearly - they were not to be brought into the house - NEVER - but to be kept in the garage. My brother, 3 years my senior, was never really kind to me, we fought all the time, but in the question of my mice he was really understanding. He built a caged-in runway for them, little wooden ladders to climb around on - and so forth. One day - I can't remember why - I did bring the mice into our house, and one of them escaped and hid behind a very heavy cupboard. Nothing we did would coax her to come forward, so eventually - we children went to sleep. Our parents were in business of their own and usually came home late, around 11pm. Suddenly - we awoke from a loud and terrible shriek - we rushed into the kitchen, our Mam was standing on the kitchen table staring down at my little white mouse. Totally in terror.
I caught the naughty little thing and put it into a box for the night, apologized to my Mum for giving her such a fright, and was told off accordingly, as you can imagine. Just about 1 week later, my 2 white mice were dead in their cage in the garage. I accused my Mom of having poisoned them, and would not speak to her for weeks on end. She protested, and said - no - she never did anything to my little pets! But I had my suspicions: in the store-room - a huge cellar in the building where our business was, some mice were busy, and when I found a nest, I took the little ones and carried them outside - I even went on my bike to bring them as far away as possible, and put them in a shrubbery or something, to hide in. But our master of the cellars (a special caretaker of stocks in food and wine) would put out mouse-traps and poison, so eventually I was fighting a lost battle. Somehow I understood, that it was not to be tolerated that mice would eat from the stock and they were unhygienic and all that, on the other hand, the little ones were so cute. So it turned out to the situation, when I was about 40 or so, I asked my Mom to tell me honestly: had she poisoned my white mice or did she ask someone else to do it from the staff? She swore a holy oath, that she had never done any such thing. When my son was a teenager, he insisting of having a bird, a budgie. It developed the habit of landing on my head and clutching to the combs in my hair, getting entangled in my long hair, and it was rather painful to remove him. He just loved to be walked around the house sitting on my head. On the other hand, the budgie and my son played to nicely together, he even learnt several tricks like riding a rolling tennis ball, that I forgave him his bad habits. One Summer my son went on a special holiday, and I had to go on a longer business trip, so I gave the budgie into the care of friends in the country. Where he escaped from the cage. When they called me, I was somehow relieved (good riddance)- but they found him again - he landed on a woman's head who was hanging out her washing. She put an ad into the paper...; there you go.
As my son grew up and was less and less at home, the poor budgie felt so lonely. He picked out his woolly under-feathers and looked just awful. His feathers were flying all over the place... just disgusting. I played and talked to him, but simply did not have the amount of time (nor honest love) to devote to him as he would have wished- and let's be honest - also deserved.
Now in retrospect - he had kept my little boy busy and quiet in bed on weekends when I (we) wanted to sleep in, and he had spent endless hours with my son when he was bored and would have gone onto my nerves otherwise, had he not been there - this little budgie - to play with him. So, I looked for a solution and some friends put him into a cage with their other budgies and he somehow recovered. When my son came home, he fetched him back occasionally. At last, he disappeared one day when I had his cage hanging on the veranda. He must have pecked it open again somehow, although we had re-inforced it. And this time he did not return.
But never ONCE did my son accuse me of letting him escape on purpose, as I was alone at home at that time. It seems, my son is just a better person than me? Or was it because he was older - much older than I was when the matter with the sudden death of my white mice happened -:))?? Did I feel bad because I had not taken better care of him? Not really. I simply could not build up the same loving and intimate relationship with this bird than my son had had. His claws in my hair and the feathers all around - yuk!
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