vagrant

A couple of weeks ago I went and spent an afternoon in my cabin during a snowstorm drinking tea and reading, watching as the trees and dome were slowly enveloped.  I put honey in my tea.  Unfortunately I forgot to put the lid on the honey.  We’ve accepted that while we aren’t there, the cabin is going to be populated by mice and we’ve attempted to seal as much food as possible into coolers and it’s mostly worked, we still know they’re there but it’s easy to ignore if we don’t have to see that they’ve chewed through the pancake mix or left a dusting of mice turds all over the counters.  This unfortunate specimen fell into my honey jar in the middle of winter and found himself helplessly mired like some saber toothed beast in a tar pit.  His last moments were probably a flurry of mice claws against glass and dismayed squeaking followed by solemn resignations as he settled in to eat the honey which was his downfall.  It occurs to me that he died of thirst or exposure since there was still a considerable amount of gooey goodness left at the bottom.  Perhaps he choked himself on it intentionally, an orgiastic suicide of sweetness.  Anyway, his little friends, having no shame and very little decency, quite obviously used his body as a stepping stone to reach even more honey; there are mouse droppings all over his belly and to add insult to injury his face appears to have been chewed off by his former comrades.

Ashe and I are currently in Costa Rica trying to adjust to sudden warmth and humidity after leaving the parched, frigid northeast.  I almost need to train myself to walk slowly again rather than run everywhere just to keep the core temperature up.    It’s still strange to me how we can go from freezing and stoic in Boston to dodging motor scooters in our flip flops on the streets of San Jose in just a few hours.