More Remembering

I really hate rodents.

It is mostly mice, but any rodent just gives me the heebbie-jeebies (spell check doesn't know this word). I don't care if it is a cute little white mouse

or a big ugly rat.

 

I just cannot stand them. I cover my eyes during movies.

We moved out of our first house because there was a mouse. When Brad came home from work to find me on the back of the couch, he set the trap for the mouse. The next day a snake come to get it out of the trap. We moved the day after that.

Well move forward a few years. We lived in a big 2-story house in Orange Texas. Barry and Megan were preschoolers. Brad saw a mouse and set a trap. Then he proceeded to go to work. That would be the night shift as a sheriff deputy in Vidor, about 15 miles away.

The kids and I did our thing and went to bed in the 3 bedrooms upstairs. Well, one thing was different. Since Brad was not home I decided to roll my hair on the pink sponge rollers. I know some of you might not remember these, but this was the early 80's.

Some time around midnight, I woke up to thump... thump..thump..thump... thump..thump. That stupid mouse was caught in the trap and was NOT DEAD. I scooted down the stairs with the heebbie-jeebies, leaving my poor sleeping children to fend for themselves. I did not even want to be on the same floor with that mouse. Wrapped in a blanket I grabbed the kitchen phone, which of course was connected to the wall by a cord. I went outside on the back steps and called Brad. When I told him the problem, he was not as sympathetic as I thought he should be. "What do you want me to do about it? I just got to work and I can't come home." Hysterically I said, "I don't care what you do, but you have to take care of that mouse."

So he called his brother, Gary, who lived in Orangefield, about 5 miles away. Remember, it's after midnight on a weeknight. Gary is sound asleep, resting up for a day of welding. "You want me to what? Are you kidding?" Well, my sweet, long-suffering brother-in-law came to my house, where he found me wrapped in a blanket on the back steps, yes, with pink curlers in my hair. He went upstairs, where my poor children were still sleeping, got the now dead mouse and threw it away.

He never said, "No", when someone needed help.

Gary, you will be missed. Heaven is a better place with you there.