Distractions

The annual “Christmas in the Barn” event is approaching fast and I am in a slight panic, as there is still so much to do and not a lot of time. There have been plenty of distractions over the past few weeks meaning that I have been dashing from one thing to another and accomplishing little.

All of my sewing and soaping is painstakingly handmade by me, and takes time to create. 

There have been no little elves to help me with wrapping soap, writing labels and making the boxes for the soaps and lavender hearts.

Recently however, I was woken abruptly during the night by an unnerving sound, which after a few heart-stopping moments I realised to my consternation was the noise of a mouse!

The sounds of gnawing and scratching between the ceiling in the downstairs front bedroom and the upstairs floorboards

indicated that this mouse intruder was not helping with my stitching like the mice in “The Tailor of Gloucester” but was instead intent upon eating my house.

With horrifying thoughts of the house burning down due to nibbled electrical cables, I raced upstairs to where the noise was coming from. Evie (who is a formidable mouser) lay in her bed, eyes half closed, sleepily listening to the noise – her nose twitching slightly and ears pointed, but astute enough to know that the mouse yet so close was in reality unreachable. The gnawing grew louder undeterred by my footsteps. I rapped sharply on the floorboards with my knuckles. “Be Gone!” I sternly commanded the mouse. Amazingly, the noise stopped immediately!

Incredibly, (and thankfully) from then on there has been no further sound of the mouse, though I lost a lot of sleep lying awake listening, until finally a couple of days later I found the petrified corpse of a mouse on the back doorstep, for which Evie was undoubtedly responsible, despite her innocent demeanour.

Evie’s penchant for mousing was the cause of the next incident that distracted me from my preparations.

An unusual and marked reluctance to leave her bed one Saturday morning puzzled me. 

At first, I thought it was because the weather was cold and miserable, but as the morning progressed, she still showed no inclination to come downstairs. Concerned that she hadn’t eaten, I coaxed her out of bed. There was a heartrending miaou of pain and Evie limped towards me holding her front left leg stiffly into her body.

A hasty visit to the vet ensued – Evie wailing and hyperventilating in distress in the cat box and me hyperventilating and babbling incoherently – thoughts of the cause of Evie’s previous injuries at the forefront of my mind. The nice vet soon had us both calmed down, Evie pretending to be brave and act as though there was nothing wrong.

The vets examination produced an unexpected finding - a deep gash on her left shoulder that I had not noticed before. The explanation was alarming. Evie had grown overconfident in her mousing and this time had taken on more than she could handle. She had picked a fight with a large rat, which had viciously inflicted multiple bites upon her resulting in rat bite fever. Whilst Evie appeared to have lost this fight, it is debatable as to the state that the rat was in at the end of fight.

Happily following a painkilling injection and antibiotics, Evie has recovered, although she prefers now to remain indoors and keep me company as I sit and stitch. At an estimated fifteen years old, (76 in human years) she has probably realised that “she can’t do what she used to do” – as the young physiotherapist told me when I had just turned 40, making me feel like I was in my dotage.

To alleviate the stress, I indulged myself in stitching a lovely embroidery design from Caroline Zoob that I had intended to keep until after the Barn event.

A Bird in the Oak on antique French Linen.

Enjoyable that it was to do, completing this embroidery has been mere procrastination and although I can now admire it in my hallway, I still have heaps of preparation to do for “Christmas in the Barn”.

The stress has returned.

xxx