Lab Mouse
Oh My God she fell. Why does that make me laugh? It shouldn’t. She really could have gotten hurt. But she didn’t.
It was the Euclid house. The brown house on Euclid. I’m not sure how old I was, but my sister, Wendy, was and always will be four years older.
Wendy always loved animals. We always had a cat. We had a Siamese named Sam. She was a good cat. She had a bajillion batches of kittens. She was a ho apparently. Carousing all night obviously. There were always lots of kittens running around. I seriously think she had 12 batches.
Wendy thought mice, gerbils and other rodents were cool too. They freaked me the eff out and I wanted no part of them. Gross. She had a white mouse. A lab mouse. I don’t know what she named it. It was small, and white and had beady red eyes. Creepy.
The Euclid house had a dirt basement. The door to go down there was on the floor of the pantry. Weird. I am guessing it was just a storage/cellar type basement. There were shelves down there. The shelves had empty jars on them. I would have hated to be down there when it was dark. Spiders and bugs and other things I’m sure relished in the environment.
We were weird kids. We would go down in that cellar and we would open the jars and then smell them. It was kind of game. Weird for sure, entertaining for hours. Sometimes we couldn’t get the lid off the jar, so it went back to its place on the shelf and was never bothered again. We thought this game was hilarious. I also remember playing this game at our great grandparents house in Viborg. Same thing, same outcomes.
Wendy was a good sister. She was carefree and a rule breaker. She pushed the envelope and the envelope got pushed right back at her. She hated school. She loved life. She loved music, animals and her friends. She loved us too. She looked out for us. She taught me to be responsible and respectful. She taught me to drive a clutch and she introduced me to all kinds of music. Her favorites were Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, but she also liked Simon and Garfunkel and Seals and Crofts.
Apparently the mouse was kept in the pantry, near food, cause that was a good idea. One night she was going to put her mouse away and stepped into the pantry. I heard some commotion and looked inside. She was at the bottom of the stairs crying and I think her mouse escaped. The door to the cellar had been left open by someone. I swear to God and on a stack of bibles, it was not me!! Seriously, it was not me.
She didn’t get hurt. That was good. I could not stop laughing. That was bad. I don’t know why it was so funny. I think it’s just one of those things that hits you and you can’t stop laughing. You know the kind of laughing that usually happens when you are in class or church and you are supposed to be quiet, but you can’t stop laughing. You try to hold it in and the person you are laughing with is also trying to hold it in. But you both can’t. You glance to the side out of the corner of you eye and you see the person shaking uncontrollably. Yeah, that kind of laughing.
To this day, when I think of her falling through the floor to the dirt floor in the cellar I cannot stop laughing. Sorry Wendy, but it really was funny! I don’t know what happened to the mouse either. I think she rescued it.