Mice wouldn’t be my first choice as pets. I have lived through mouse plagues when cars went off the roads because of sheets of mice. They ate through wood and Tupperware and books and if you went out to the shed, they would be running around the bottoms of drums. The cats pretended they couldn’t see them, the local boys earned pocket money building better mouse traps and little old ladies devised novel ways of reusing mousepaper (like fly paper, only for mice).
But even so, I always liked sitting quietly on the stairs of the veranda and watching them dart out, all quick and dark-furred with their tiny delicate ears and fiercely curious faces. There was an old piano on the veranda, and the mice inside used to slide up and down the strings, sounding tiny notes.
The quote at the top is from Rose Fyleman’s poem, “I think mice are rather nice”. The music is from one of my favourite films.
For Jenn’s moleskine for the 42nd Moleskine Exchange http://moleskinex42.blogspot.com/. This is part of the international moleskine exchange (http://www.flickr.com/groups/moly_x).
June 22, 2009 at 5:10 pm
I like the shading on the closeup, and the musical notes.
I wouldn’t have mice as pets either.
June 26, 2009 at 10:08 am
They should be allowed to run free!
And play musical instruments.
June 24, 2009 at 2:55 pm
I think these mice are rather nice! (Part of this one would not be a bad header for July, perhaps…)
But I guess I have never heard of “mouse plagues” such as you describe. It’d take a LOT of cats to deal with something like that. Perhaps that is why the cats you saw “pretended they couldn’t see them”: they just gave up!
June 26, 2009 at 10:10 am
Thanks! And I will keep that suggestion in mind, since I’m going to be moving & setting up house over the next week or so.
Sometimes we would lock the cats in the bathroom with a handful of mice, and when we opened the door the cats would bolt, leaving the mice scampering merrily behind.