The Writer’s Pen

Sometimes as I experience the world it is as though I have a pen in my hand, wanting to put in black and white an incident, a feeling, a name, an idea, a subject I have dropped and need to pick up, a subject I just need to drop ….

Having too much to think about, I put my pen down a few weeks ago, but yesterday I started bubbling with ideas to tell Doral while he is in the hospital.  So move over, writer’s pen, I am getting on my computer.

I saw a wee vole late in the evening a couple of nights ago.  It scampered from somewhere behind my toilet and headed across the room to a small wall vent in the opposite wall.  “You shouldn’t have let me see you,” I thought quietly, and tried to figure out where my mouse traps were.  One is in my room, but separated from the other four and I have been trying to get them all into the same place.  I don’t like the black sticky traps, since I don’t want to deal with a mouse squealing for help.  Just a simple snap and you are dead to me. 

Betty found one of the sticky traps.  It attached itself to her shoe when she tried to test it out.  I didn’t want her pulling that trap off of her shoe and then sticking to every spot she stepped next.  I notice when pulling it off that half sticks to the trap and half sticks to the shoe, the substance of the glue stretching between both but not snapping off of either.

Back to the traps that do work.  This morning I saw I had caught at least one of the little creatures that take free reign of my house in the evenings.  I try to keep food in the kitchen, and I guess I should put only in the kitchen in bold letters, since I can’t figure out why I would want to make banquets all over the house for the midnight visitors.

I knew Michael, Betty and Alice would soon be over and I thought they might like to see what a fabulous grandmother I am: able to catch rodents on my own.  Only Alice and Betty were here.  I put on surgical gloves.  I only had two and Betty wanted to wear one, so I let her until I had the mouse trap in one hand and needed the glove on my other hand to open it.  She gladly gave it up to me – probably the first instance I have ever seen where she didn’t want to do something herself.  Richard remarked that you could tell that the vole was dead because its tail was straight.  I don’t know if he was just making that up or not, but it was an outstanding feature of what I had in my hands. 

I told the girls that we were going to put the vole out for other creatures to eat, and that we would leave it there and keep checking to see if a bird or some other animal came around.  They played on the porch so they could watch the action on the lawn.  When I asked Betty if she wanted to carry the trap back inside so that we could reset it, her head went one way and both arms went in the opposite direction, which I took as a no.

My dishwasher hasn’t been working for a number of days.  I don’t have an in-house fix-it person, and my solution has been to do the dishes by hand.  Richard asked me how I wanted to solve this problem:  have someone go in and look at the filter, or buy a new dishwasher.  I thought that either solution is going to take a morning’s work, either taking the machine apart, or installing a new one.  The moment was right for Richard to take just a small look.

When he got down on the floor to look he said, “Well, not much right is going on here.  But there is one plus.  I choose the right screwdriver to do the job.”  As the pieces came out of the dishwasher, I stood by to wash them.  The layers of calcium were astonishing to me – and that is on every piece, in the nooks, the crannies, the corners, on the flat spaces.  I had cleaned up one of the round units, but I had to ask him how to get at the inside, since I could see through a net that the layers of calcium in there were caked on like river sediment.  Richard just put the unit down on the counter, so I was still left with my question.  He said he was just blocked and that perhaps Miranda will have to do that piece.  I love it when he defers to her.  He is always telling me she is the smarter of the two of them

Tonia came by for a visit at that moment.  I told Richard to join Michael and Miranda at the beach.  He said, “If I leave this job now, I will not get back to it for one year.  That is just how life rolls for me.”  I backed right off of the suggestion that he finish it later.

When he picked up the filter again I wondered if he would go to youtube for help, but he started to talk himself through the operation.  “Two pieces, they must come apart, the problem will be stripping the mechanism if the two pieces are tightened together that way, no information on the plastic that says to either turn left or right, can it be popped off?  

The test load comes out clean.

And then bang, it was off, the two pieces in my hand and he said, well, I had to wait to get some courage to try that, and now that it is done, on to snapping another piece out of here.

This long story can be made short:  calcium deposits now fill my compost bucket, CLR has been run through the machine and the dishwasher with the cleanest insides ever and has had a test run. 

Oh sweet, Mr. Dishwasher Repairman!

Arta