Found

Last Friday, I woke up to an awful stench in my kitchen. We had recently put out mouse poison, so I knew that a mouse most likely "given up the ghost" somewhere in one of the cabinets. After doing the never pleasant sniff test, I figured out which cabinet it was--my card/junk cabinet. I didn't have any time to go through and find the thing, as I was busy from the time I got up until the time I got home at 8:30 p.m., so I left it for Saturday.
Saturday morning, the smell was even more nauseating, so I set to work on finding it early. I took out a couple of boxes and there it was. My oldest daughter, who runs her own "Mouse Disposal Service: $1 per mouse" business, wasn't home, so I paid my second daughter to dispose of it. (Why do it myself if my kids will do it for money?!) Upon picking up the mouse with a plastic bag over her hand, we discovered that it had a baby mouse laying beside it! Great! How many more of the nasty things had died under there?? It turns out that the baby was the only one and it wasn't dead yet. I knew it couldn't survive, but if I thought it had a fighting chance, I would have tried to save it. I'm just that way--I can't stand to see a little thing die!!! I also couldn't bear to kill it, so I waited for my husband to come home and do the job. While we were waiting, my kids sat around looking at it and feeling sorry for it, too. I'm surprised they didn't cry when my dh killed it.
Later that day, I started looking through the boxes of cards I had taken out of the cabinet and in one of them I found my ultrasound picture of Mercy. It was in a card from an acquaintance who'd had 5 miscarriages of her own. My husband and daughter were in the kitchen with me, so I nonchalantly walked out, card in hand, to go to the bathroom and cry. When I was better, I put the card and the u/s photo in my Bible. I haven't looked at it again, but it's there when I want to.
That night, we built a fire in our yard, roasted marshmallows, and made S'Mores. For the first time in a long time, I thought about how things would have been if Mercy wouldn't have died. I would have been freaked out when my little almost 2 year old got near the fire or when he/she got out of the firelight range into the darkness. I didn't cry, but I was quiet and pensive all day and night.
I'm glad I found the picture and am glad that I'll see Mercy again, full of life.
Paula