Mouse Stories

I was doubtful when I made my Kitchen Mouse Potholders that anyone would want a mouse, even if it’s only a picture on a potholder, in their kitchen. But some of the people who bought them told me the most heartwarming and compassionate mouse stories, and I want to share them.

(Instead of making Christine’s mice into potholders I just backed them with a piece of fabric because she is going to frame them.)

” Believe it or not, she wrote me,  “when my son was little he had pet mice and to teach him about hard decisions to make in life, when one developed a tumor, he actually chose to have surgery for his mouse, (it didn’t survive the surgery but he had other mice that lived good long mice lives) so we have a fondness for them – tame or wild.”  

Then Christine told me how her son went to school to become a lawyer but decided not to practice because he found the law to be unfair. So he went back to school this time to become a nurse.  Christine wonders “ if that planted the seed of interest.”

Then Barbara wrote to me about how when she and her husband bought a little cottage in 1994 it came with mice.  “What is a cottage without mice?” she wrote.   They would capture the mice in Have-a-Heart traps and drives miles away to let them go. Although she did have a feeling some of them made their way back.

But once at home Barbara caught a mouse in a “not so humane trap” but only his leg was stuck.   So she nursed him back to health and when he was ready to be released she “watched him high tail it up the hill in my back yard”. 

Jackie wrote me the last story in a card she sent with her check.  It goes like this….

“Twenty years ago, I lived in a farrowing shed outside of Iowa City (the loveliest little nest).  A Buddhist Monk lived there before me, old enough to have spent time in prison after the 1959 uprising in Tibet.  He had rigged up a system for “catching” mice by tying bells around chicken bones, which he somehow suspended in a gallon-sized jar.  Mice rang the bells waking him up and he would carry the jar outside and set them free over and over and over again.”