I am normally not a squeamish kind of person. Needles don’t bother me. Frank discussions of bodily functions don’t faze me. As a kid, I was the one who took the dead, squished mice out of the mousetraps and helped my dad bury the dead, trapped skunks, while my sister ran the other way.
But tonight, I came as close as I ever have to screaming like a little girl.
My mom and I went out to run some errands this evening, and Michael got both Jade’s supper and our supper cooked in the meantime — no small feat, especially with a toddler to supervise/entertain. One of the ways he kept Jade occupied was by letting her play in the drawer under the oven, the one filled with all the baking pans.
Of course, there’s so much stuff in there, all the pans have to be arranged just so in order for the drawer to close. And I’m the only one who can arrange it just so. So, when I went to rearrange the bakeware, I found that the bottom of one of the springform pans had fallen back into the murk behind the drawer.
I pulled out the drawer as far as it would go without actually removing it from its tracks. There was the bottom of the pan. And look! What’s that? One of Crook’s toy mice! Oh, yes, and there’s a green rubber ball of Crook’s. And another toy mouse. My mother was pulling them out with her rubber-gloved hand, but I had a better view, so I started retrieving cat-hair-covered objects, as well. (Isn’t it amazing how pet hair accumulates in the spots we never sweep or vacuum?)
Why, here is the breastfeeding bracelet my friend Jenn gave me when Jade was born. I thought it was in my nightstand, and had been contemplating digging it out. And here’s one of Jade’s bath toys. And here’s… um… another toy mouse? No, it’s too big. Um…
That’s when I shrieked.
Because what I had grabbed was not a toy mouse, but the cat-hair-covered, dessicated body of a bird.
A harmless dead body, to be sure, but when you’re not expecting to grab a dead anything, well, revulsion is a natural reaction, isn’t it?
I shrieked all the way to the bathroom, where I thoroughly scrubbed my hands as I shivered in disgust. Michael, who was parked in the living room with a sleeping baby on his chest, pointedly asked me just who I thought brought that dead bird into the house. (“YOUR cat,” he concluded smugly. At which I cleverly told him to shut up.)
That space under the oven? It is SO clean now.
