The Christmas Mouse

 

 I have had many prayer requests from odd animals before, but I have never received one from a mouse until today.

The mouse was outside in the cold and dark.  It needed to find a new home.  I asked what caused him to be in this predicament, and this was his answer:

"This summer, I needed a new place to live. I noticed a shed next to a house. I slipped inside and saw plastic tubs piled one on top of the other. Curious, I climbed to the top.

"At the very top was a tub with a folding lid.  I burrowed in and found ribbons, strings, and plastic figurines.  At that moment, I realized I was the luckiest mouse around.  I had stumbled upon the perfect place to make a new home.

"It took me a day to chew through the strings and gather the ribbons to make me a proper nest, which I built snuggly in one of the many compartments that separated the trinkets.  My nest was on the top floor, the second was for food storage, and the third was to hide when the humans came into the shed.   Luckily, they never detected the presence of my luxury apartment.  When they stopped working in the garden for the year, I thought I was safe for the winter.

"There were bird feeders near the shed, and all I had to do was sneak ten feet across the yard, fill my mouth with them and bring it back to my deluxe apartment.   I had piles of it stored up until spring.

"I was sitting down to my Thanksgiving feast when suddenly the shed door opened, my tub was picked up, and moved into the porch.  Nothing else happened, and I took this as a bit of good luck.  It was a lot warmer on the patio.

"Four days later, the tub was moved again, this time into the warm house.  But, it wasn't a bit of good fortune.  They opened the tub lid, and the humans found my nest and little piles of bird food scattered in the compartments. Thankfully, they were not at the higher intelligence end for their species because, while they could tell from things being chewed that something had been in the tub, they thought the creature had fled.  Little did they know I had just taken refuge on the first floor.

"I stayed low, trembling, as the trinkets were removed and hung on a tree. What kinds of barbarians were these people?  I went to a corner of the tub and tried to hide.  Finally, the woman removed the last level, and I was exposed. At first, she thought I was a fuzzy ornament,t then that I was dead until I looked up, smiled, and said, "Hiya, Sweetie."

"She screamed, then I did too, and a man came from another room and told her to close the lid.   He picked up the tub and, while I hoped I would be brought back to the shed, once we got outside, he turned the tub sideways, kicked it once, and I hurried out, evicted from my home, just before Christmas.  There ought to be a law!"

You will be pleased to know I made a little nest for the mouse next to the heater underneath the kitchen.  As long as Ugly Joan does not patrol the underworld, he can still get his food from the birdfeeder and be safe from prey.  

And, when spring comes, he will crawl up the wall, find a crack in the floor, climb inside, and run across the floor because that will be his revenge.

You can't kick a mouse out of his home before Christmas.