Well, sometimes you gauge your days by the number of lives you’ve improved or brightened, and if you’re like me, it’s a pretty low number. But Sunday I scored at least 1.<\/p>\n
As I have mentioned, I like to step into our pool for five minutes in the mornings and the evenings. After all, we pay a pile to keep it going. Someone<\/em> should use it. Now that we’re getting into the end of the pool year, it’s more rewarding because the water is colder. A dip in the morning, and I’m shivering and the fat is burning all day. A dip in the evenings, and I’m ready to get under the blankets and go to sleep.<\/p>\n But, sometimes, in the middle of the day, I step in to recharge. I’ve stopped, mostly, drinking coffee in the afternoons. So to perk myself up (now that the pool is a Wisconsin temperature), I’ll step in in the middle of the day. Sorry, I said that last sentence. Perhaps I need a dip.<\/p>\n So, on Sunday, I stepped into the pool mid-day. I say “step in” because we have a shallow end which shallow ends in steps, and one can walk into the pool there. The deep end has a diving board and a ladder. When I was younger, I would jump into the water, even when\/especially when it was cold to acclimate quickly. Now, I step in measuredly, but not gingerly.<\/p>\n Mid-day, the sun is up and it alters which side of the pool I go to. In the dark, at sunrise or at sunset, it doesn’t matter. But when the sun is high, I want it at my back, or at least the top of my head where I’m facing away from its strongest rays. So, on Sunday, after noon, I went to the west wall of the pool, and saw something on the top rung of the ladder.<\/p>\n Now, here in the country, you get odd boles, bumps, mounds, and whatnot out of seemingly nowhere. Why, just yesterday, I was driving down Primrose and saw they’d gotten well onto building a large structure which signs indicated will be a Children’s Hospital. Which was in town, on a road I don’t travel that often, but it’s sometimes moreso that way out in the country (rapidly suburbanizing).<\/p>\n I squinted. Not because of the sunshine so much but mostly because I’m getting older, and I’m outside the age where LASIK touch-ups are effective (so soon?), and I’m to vain to get glasses, but I wouldn’t have worn them to the pool and would have to squint anyway. Is it a dead bird? A pile of leaves? Something more sinister?<\/em>. I resolved to not let it bother me, but after only a minute and thirteen seconds in the pool (the temperature in the upper seventies yet, so I was not wussing out), I got out and had a look. <\/p>\n Dead bird? Baby possum? No, it was a fat field mouse, holding on for dear life and also terrified into petrification lest I eat it.<\/p>\n Sometimes, I dump tiny field mice from the skimmer baskets, but not mhonkers like this. Perhaps it had gotten disoriented in the overnight storms. But it probably did not know to hop from the ladder to the deck, and I’m not sure it could have executed the maneuver if it knew to try.<\/p>\n So I got the little manual skimmer, which is not so much a net as a paddle, and I knocked it into the pool. It started to scramble, indicating vita<\/em>, and I scooped it up to the deck. Whereupon it found its footing akin to the cartoons we old-timers have seen in our childhood, and it scrambled across the deck and through the fence towards my house, most likely toward my beautiful wife’s flower garden and perhaps a nice little spot under our decaying deck.<\/p>\n So: I saved a life that day. Not a human one. So no song for it, but I feel just a little better about myself. As long as it stays outside. Because if it comes inside, the (cat) boys will dispatch it our I will. Because, you know, we all have our arbitrary rules for preservation of life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, sometimes you gauge your days by the number of lives you’ve improved or brightened, and if you’re like me, it’s a pretty low number. But Sunday I scored at least 1. As I have mentioned, I like to step into our pool for five minutes in the mornings and the evenings. After all, we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35731"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35732,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35731\/revisions\/35732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}