I was talking to the mouse in the mailbox when I arrived at Refuge Farm. I had been contemplating the coup d’etat in Cairo and the Zimmerman trial in the predictably slower-than-normal pre-holiday flight of cars from the imperial city.
I frankly do not know what to think about either, except that Mr. Zimmerman’s life is clearly about over, regardless of the verdict, and that I could be mildly optimistic about the same prognosis for the Muslim Brotherhood.
But both were troubling, and it was with mild apprehension that I looked down the road for approaching traffic from the direction of Rosemary’s Summerduck Run Farm. Seeing none, I swerved across the middle of the un-lined asphalt county road to approach the box from the driver’s door of the Panzer.
I reached out the window to lower the door to the box, wondering if I would confront the mail or the interloper in a pile of shredded paper. I figured the odds might be a fifty-fifty: live interloper, or tiny corpse.
I had bombed it with ant and wasp repellent before departing earlier in the week, and at first glance it appeared that the wasps who had been constructing a gray hive out of the mail were gone. That was a curious symbiosis, I thought, an odd couple of room-mates indeed. I peered into the gloom of the deep plastic tunnel and saw him.
The mouse looked at me speculatively with glittering black eyes. I looked back sternly as I lectured him.
“You are not supposed to be here,” I said. “I am not Bashir Al Assad. I only conducted chemical warfare against you because you are in clear violation of United States Postal regulations, and you have willingly and with malice afrethought destroyed First Class mail.”
The mouse said nothing in response, blinking against the unexpected late afternoon light. The interior of the box must have been snug against the freshet of rain that had bathed the farm over the last few hours, deepening the ruts in the gravel drive and making the streams that bound the property roar.
“Move along,” I said. “This is completely unacceptable. I will not suffer infection from the Hantavirus your kind is known to carry, since the Affordable Care Act’s implementation has been delayed until after the mid-term elections. I frankly view your freeloading in my box to be unworthy of the Occupy Movement. Unless you decamp swiftly, I will be forced to escalate this disagreement into a kinetic frame of reference.”
The mouse again had no response to this, clutching his two fore-paws against the snowy fur of his chest. In a previous conversation, two weeks before, he had fled to the rear of the mailbox and dropped out through a hole in the bottom, falling with a soft ‘plop’ onto the foliage that has sprouted up around the base with the lushness of the season.
I had hoped he would take my initial warning seriously, but he did not. In fact, it appeared that he had assumed an air of entitlement that I found insolent.
This time the mouse stood his ground, and I realized that my stern tone and obvious unhappiness meant nothing against his ruthless agenda of free lodging and regular provision of advertising fliers and junk mail he could gnaw into a cozy nest.
He determination to stand resolute was practical; after all, the box was only opened at best once a day a few times a week by the dedicated letter-carrier, and once on the weekend by me.
Otherwise, it was defensible, dark, cozy and regularly provisioned by the United States Government with consumables. Honestly, I don’t blame the little fellow. I resolved to do something about the matter, and left the door to the box open as I put the Panzer in gear and crunched onto the gravel driveway.
If it is not one thing, it certainly appears to be another thing in the country. I infinitely prefer the scale of them down in Culpeper, though.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com