Mice

Mice

Noel Laflin

4-8-18

'Do you like hummingbirds?'I asked the older woman sitting two chairs over.

'Well, yes I do,' she said with a smile.

'You want to see a picture of one?' I ventured, pulling out my phone and opening up a sweetheart of a shot.

'Oh, my!' She said. 'That is lovely! Do you like mice, by chance?'

'Yeah, I do,' I replied. 'I had pet mice as a kid.'

My new friend, Barbara, who couldn't have been a day under eighty, but had the finger dexterity of a teenage girl flipping through pictures on her phone, quickly located what she was looking for.

It was a cute Internet image of a sleeping mouse with a quilt pulled up to its chin.

'That's sweet,' I said, now my turn to smile.

'All creatures great and small,' I concluded.

'But I like mostly small best of all,' she sighed, continuing to sweep the face of her phone and chuckling over more pictures of mice.