A Mouse Up My Leg

Certain memories linger though we’d prefer they didn’t. One such for me is the time a mouse ran up my leg inside my pants. I was living in a student apartment in Wichita. It was a duplex, probably built in the 1920s or 1930s. There was a moldy, dusty basement that I was afraid to go into, and fortunately there was no reason to do so. Mice lived in the basement, apparently in abundance. I would be reading or writing late at night, and regularly a mouse would scuttle along the baseboard across the room from me, usually three or four of them an evening. Sometimes they would pause, look up to see what I was doing, and seeing I wasn’t doing anything that threatened them, go about their business. We had what was essentially an appeasement – they went about their business in quiet, and I went about mine. Then one morning I was in the bathroom, doing my business, my jeans down around my ankles. The heating in the apartment was forced air and for some reason there was an open grate on the floor just in front of the stool in the bathroom, placed just so that my downed pants leg covered much of the grate. Yes, as I sat there I felt something scurry up my leg. I slapped at it when it got somewhere around my knee, stood up, and saw the rodent fall dazed briefly to the floor, then disappear quickly back into the grate and back to the basement. I don’t know if that mouse survived. It probably did. And surely it had a tale to tell of survival in the jungle above the grate and in the dark night of the denim. And I have the memory that in 40 years won’t go away.