Morning Pages September 1st 2023
We catch the rat in the attic and if it could hiss and spit it would. Smaller than I expected but unhappy to be caught even though we put everything in the kitchen away. Avocado, mango, peaches, crackers. Like a snake it coils and recoils making my heart leap, all around the cage.
There’s never just one. My girlfriend says over the phone. After I’ve showered and right before the nanny leaves so I have a moment to talk on the phone.
Historically. I say back laughing. There’s only been just one.
And then. The cat and I hear it again. This time in the kitchen. A little scratching. And I think oh no. And I think, maybe it was just the clock slapping the time down in the way that makes me jump in the evening in the quiet. Maybe the monitor caught the baby rustling.
But the next morning. I hear the scratching again. In the bedroom, before I am even up, a foot on a little body in the walls.
My husband says I think it’s a mouse. Poop smaller. The cardboard the trap lay on all chewed through. The attic full of my clothes. Some I am saving for the baby. Some from pregnancy. Some I can’t part with. All of my favorite jeans, my hips now too wide for them.
The attic trap is tripped and then tripped and then tripped again. All through the week we come up with nothing. I can’t sleep. The baby waking hungry.
We sit in the park and my husband says. There is no wind. Sounding like me. The week of 100 hundred degrees.
Then I hear my husband saying Hey buddy. This morning. So softly. So sweetly. The attic door open. It was shaking. My husband says later. It was so timid. This housemate of ours. I hope that’s the last of them.
One thing at a time. I have to tell myself. Change the sheets. Then soak the baby’s clothes. Then the recipe for meatballs. Then put the paper in the printer. Then open the window. The birds flying into the glass recently. Huge thuds that makes us all jump. My office window, the picture window off the living room. They always recover, but I wonder what they are searching for. My habit of leaving things open ended, in the middle, half done. Plaguing me. Often, I’ve gone to write something down. And then I forget, the bed half made, the laundry never making it out of the wash and needing to be rerun again.
Los Angeles is funny in September. Fall just a smell at the edge of the scene.
The house unusually quiet this morning. Both the baby and my husband out. I am supposed to be writing. But there were some superfluous things I wanted to get done. Like get the record player fixed. Like frame the print I bought my husband for our first wedding anniversary. Frame the Lora Webb Nichols I had bought before the baby was born that now when she is in a good mood before bed she says Goodnight kiddledee to the cat on top of the boy’s hat facing the prairie in 1910. Our friend James turning us on to her.
The weather predicting a thunderstorm this morning in the middle of the day, a chance of showers. On Elisabeth’s birthday. This morning a breeze. This morning some clouds. Altocumulus. I wonder.