Interloper

 

This afternoon, I put back a stepladder into its proper place in my garage after a long absence.  As I stepped over and around stuff in my crowded garage, I noticed loose kernels of corn in my cornhole bag bucket.  I thought, “Oh, no, another bag has busted due to hard play.”  But a closer look revealed corn kernel pieces.  Obviously, a mouse had been playing his own version of cornhole: supper.  I started pulling bags out of the bucket one at a time examining them for nibbled holes as I went, when I stopped short.  I thought, “What if the mouse is still in the bucket?!”  So I carefully carried the bucket outside and dumped out the contents.  Thankfully, no mouse.  But three of my twenty cornhole bags were nibbled through.  For a brief moment, I felt sorry for the tiny mouse who just wanted a meal to stay alive in the cold, harsh winter.  But then I remembered that mice should live in the weeds outdoors and eat from the huge pile of sunflower seeds underneath my bird feeders.  That mouse was an intruder in my house with no business in my garage.  I found a lid for my cornhole bucket and capped the lid with two mousetraps.  I hope the mouse likes Swiss cheese, because, hopefully, that will be his final meal.  His laziness has gotten him a capital sentence.  Solomon could have been speaking of my mouse in Proverbs 20:4, “The sluggard will not plow by reason of the cold; therefore shall he beg in harvest, and have nothing.”  Too bad the mouse is too lazy to stay outside where he belongs.  Hey, don’t take shortcuts in life.  If you do, like my doomed mouse, you will not prosper.