All Creatures Great and Small
I tended my 5 year old namesake grandson. It’s always a treat. Recently water safe, he wanted to go to the community pool.
After spending some time in the main, sizable pool, he decided he wanted to visit the smaller kiddies pool, where he had spent time before he learned to swim. The water therein is only 12 inches deep.
We’d been there awhile, enjoying the slightly saline water and the sun, examining the various jets and filters, when he suddenly said, “Grandpa, there’s a mouse!” and scampered out of the water posthaste.
I looked around the circular pool, and sure enough, he was right.
An observant child, he had spotted the little creature in the shadows in the almost rectangular opening below the filter basket, just above water level. It was barely discernible to me. It would venture forward a bit, then retreat, but never far from the opening. It looked to be in distress.
The thought occurred to me: who’s to say this isn’t a relative of Mickey and Minnie (my grandson loves Disneyland and Disney characters)? We had also recently viewed an animated film, “The Tales of Despereaux,” featuring a brave mouse who helps rescue a princess who has fallen into the clutches of some nefarious rats. Was that coincidence?
About this time my daughter, an inveterate animal lover, arrived to pick up her son. I told her about the plight of the mouse.
She marched over to the round plastic cover above the filter basket and, with my help, removed it. We could see the backside of the mouse as it crouched above water level, perched on the rim of the rectangular opening, able to move neither forward nor backward without falling into what must have seemed to it to be an ocean. It had more room to move forward than backward, but it must have sensed that, if it ventured too far ahead, it would slide down a slippery slope into a sea from which there might well be no escape.
I surmised it had, perhaps in pursuit of an insect, probably initially fallen through a hole in the cover into the round well of water in which the basket sat. It had managed to climb out of the water, but the only place of comparative refuge was where it now sat, trapped.
“How do we get it out?” my daughter asked.
“We need a stick,” I replied. “Like a small branch or something.”
She quickly broke off a branch of a nearby small tree and brought it. I thought perhaps it was best to insert the branch from the pool side, in front of the mouse, but she approached the mouse from the rear, through the opening above the filter basket.
Fortunately, it responded in the manner we intended, and climbed onto the branch.
She quickly removed the branch and lowered the mouse to the nearby dirt.
Other than being obviously wet, it seemed none the worse for wear, so probably had not been in the predicament long. Sitting, it dried its whiskers with its front paws, then promptly disappeared.
This seems like such a small thing. And, in the big scheme of things, it is. But life is comprised of small things. In addition to probably saving the life of one of nature’s many creatures, my daughter’s actions taught my grandson a valuable lesson — about being helpful whenever possible, about being resourceful, about reverence for the sanctity of life.
I think those are things he will remember.