Mousies

Our cats over the years have all been good mousers, and as a result we've been frequently given unwanted gifts of dead mice on our doorstep.  The dead mice seem to us to be a special kind of gift-- something the cats apparently really want to give us, but something we really don't need or want.  We always call them "mousies." A few weeks ago it occurred to me that the pieces of unwanted advice I am so tempted to give to my adult children are really mousies in the truest sense of the word.  My journal group had decided for this next month to each develop a completely different practice for our journals-- to keep track of something we've not kept track of before.  I immediately thought of a mousies journal.

I carved a small dead mouse stamp out of  pink carving material.  I slammed together a down and dirty little pamphlet book to use as the journal for the next month.  And as often as I can catch myself with a mousie of advice ripe for the giving, I stamp a mousie in the journal and print the advice in tiny letters on the carcass.  If I have managed to catch the mousie before I lay the advice on the person, I hang the mousie up by its tail.  If the advice escapes, however, that mousie runs across the bottom of the page.  It has been interesting to see how often I harbor mousies, and using the journal has definitely reduced the number of mousies that I am laying on various doorsteps.