Robert Burns (1759-1796), Scotland’s best-known poet and farmer, was ploughing his field one day when he upended a mouse’s winter nest. The poem Burns wrote in the original Scots language, “To A Mouse”, is as difficult to decipher as Peg and I found trying to comprehend conversations when we visited Scotland. Therefore, I will cite the English version that in part says to the “Little, sleek, cowering timorous beast”:
“I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
And justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes you startle,
At me, your poor earth-born companion and fellow mortal?
….
But Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes of Mice and Men
Go oft awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain .…”
Then Burns turns his thoughts inward towards his own fate:
“Still you are blessed compared with me!
The present only touches you:
But Oh? I backward cast my eye,
On prospects dreary!
And forward, though I cannot see, I guess and fear.”
In other words, the mouse may have lost his present home, but it is not burdened with regrets from the past or dread of the future. Shelter alone is the mouse’s concern, but Burns is chained to past misfortunes and the possibilities of future disasters, much as each of us humans are. The mouse’s loss of a temporary home pales in comparison to mankind’s sentient reality.
Gentle Reader, you may wonder what these two conflicting perspectives have to do with anything. Of course, you may not even take note. However, to me the dilemma between the Wee Beastie’s loss of a nest and Burns’ acknowledgement that “ignorance may be bliss” came clearly into my mind when Peg said, “Jim, I smell a dead mouse in the kitchen”. Naturally, the onus was upon me to answer for the mouse’s demise and alter any more future consequences. I am married; I know the drill.
My first response was my fallback position for all domestic quandaries, I ignored it. Unfortunately, Peg was not willing to let nature deal with nature so waiting until the smell was gone was not feasible. Then I searched for a mouse corpse in the usual places, such as under the kitchen sink or near the pantry, nothing. Next, I checked around the outside of our log cabin to see if there was an odiferous source in Peg’s dried flowers, nope.
All easy solutions failed me. The dreaded, “Jim, someone (me) needs to crawl under the house to see if some animal (we have lots of them) died there and is rotting away”. Oh, the glories of flashlights, facemasks, knee pads and possible confrontations with Big Foot or perhaps an upset skunk. I donned my gear and armed myself with a large trash bag and a short-handled shovel.
After about an hour of banging my head and digging up suspect piles of damp dirt I declared a truce with Ma Nature and told Peg I thought the smell was well on its way to dissipation so we should just hang on awhile. You might already know how that resolution was received.
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