Shudder

There's a mouse in my basement.

Rather like the heroine of Ludwig Bemelman's Madeline (a favorite book around here), I am not afraid of mice, and I love winter, snow, and ice.  So the mouse in my basement isn't causing me to squeal and jump on any available bit of furniture.  But it is bothering me.

Why?  Because of the apartment we rented for six months before we moved here.  It was, to put it delicately, vermin-infested.  We were plagued with mice twice, once for over a month.  This mouse we have in our basement is, according to my husband, a nice, little, brown field mouse, and not one of the ugly, grey, ratlike city mice that we had in our previous apartment.  But all the same, I'm having flashbacks to our miserable existence there, and worried that the mouse in our basement is a precursor of a return to the world of mice, roaches, and misery.

Of course, it isn't.  It's just a mouse.  We'll catch it and be rid of it, and we'll figure out how it got in (we think a neighboring cat chased it in here, as one was sniffing around our deck last night) and plug the hole so other mice don't come here too.  All the same, I'm shuddering at the memory of those six horrible months and praying we'll never have to live anywhere so dreadful again.