Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 14, 1994 TAG: 9411150028
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The trap didn't spring. And so somewhere in my house, right at this moment, is a fat mouse with peanut butter on its breath.
I don't know about the efficacy of anyone's building a better mousetrap, since clearly here in Floyd County we are breeding better mice.
We didn't have such a problem with mice when the snake was living with us. But, along with a lot of other things we used to have, the snake's gone. (And, when pressed, I must admit that I'd rather have mice than a snake.)
Along with the snake, we've also lost a wood stove, a summer garden, rampant blackberry thickets, a hot-water canner, and our smooth, dark hair.
I just had a birthday. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, I'm now eight years beyond my middle age.
Yikes!
I checked this morning (since I was already awake) to see if I can still touch my toes without bending my knees. I can't.
And all one day last week I knew it was going to rain, because my arthritis was acting up.
But - middle-aged!
The grown-ups are middle-aged! Not me. Certainly not me.
Of course, the kids in my Sunday school class would beg to differ. They're middle-schoolers. To them, I'm older than dirt. And odder, too. I have no children of my own, of any age, and yet I'm older than their parents. What kind of a person is that?
Just the other day, while driving, I was having one of those discussions in my head that I often have in which I explain myself to some vague, unidentified, but infinitely interested conversant. In these discussions, I'm invariably brilliant, incisive and witty.
I was telling this conversant that I'm a great aunt, but would have made a poor mother. The reason being: I like children because with them I can, myself, be childlike.
This is the luxury of aunts. A luxury that mothers can't very often afford.
My conversant had no comment.
But this explains why, at the family reunion the other weekend, although I was polite to the members of my generation and the generation before me, I spent most of my time with the next. Dandling babies, playing with kids, even engaging a teen-ager or two in chit-chat. I threw rocks in the river, played hide-n-seek in the trees, ate too much, and took two rides in the horse-drawn wagon.
Now what, you ask, does any of this have to do with mice nibbling the peanut butter off the traps in my bedroom?
It's all my way of wondering how a person, eight years beyond her middle age, arthritic, rendered these days incapable of touching her own toes and often unable to sleep through the night (mice or not), how such a person can also prefer hide-n-seek to reminiscing conversations with cousins near her own age? How such a woman can see in the mirror, even now, grey hair notwithstanding, the same big-toothed, diffident little girl she's always seen?
How such a person can feel so much younger now than she's ever felt before?
Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB