MindSpinner

The brown mouse lives because he declined to die of fright, which ought to be a lesson to us all. We’re not quite sure how he’s doing because he isn’t getting around much, but he’s safe in a very large jar, with a little hankie-sized blanket, a bottle cap full of water and a dozen or so wheat berries for whenever he gets hungry. I found him huddled in the bathroom closet, content to let me scoop him up (with a scoop). He was exhausted, though not visibly injured. He’d already supped full of horrors and nothing could scare him any more, not even a great hairless, long-fingered paw like mine. I’d gotten no farther than the hallway with him when dark-haired daughter intercepted us and announced his adoption, declaring that we couldn’t put him out in the cold. Far be it from me to offer a counter argument - I wouldn’t be able to look in the mirror and recognize myself. So there’s still a mouse in the house.

He brought it for gift to me, after a clattering in the kitchen, brought it limp, its gray tail hanging. He was not murderous with blood on his white teeth or death in his green eye. He had a furry toy to share instead and set it down to play. He expected me to be as charmed as he, and not to yelp when his gift, lightly dropped, up and fled. My reaction proved a puzzlement. He made a game of catch and release, batting the panicked mouse with his white paw, catching it up in his teeth and letting it go again and again, while I tried to conjure a means of removing the mouse alive. Picking up the cat with the mouse yet in his jaws and taking the two of them outside was not an option given that the cat would likely let it drop. Corraling the cat would unleash the mouse to make a beeline for my closet door, hide out in some crevice and live to raise its young in my shoe. Nothing would work - the mouse was far too quick for me alone. “Mouse,” I explained, “you are too scampery to save.”

When the chase retired to the bathroom, I closed the door. What would be would be.

A half an hour later, no mouse. As for the cat, he’d no doubt toyed the mouse at last to death and then saw nothing left to do but dine - as a practical matter. He napped content on the bed beside me for a time while I contemplated my culpability in the matter of the death of a small brown mouse. I haven’t yet pulled out the stove, you see, found the hole, and stuffed it tight with steel wool. No, I have sat here, instead, and sounded words like piano keys, in search of a tune.

For his part, the cat has now wakened, stretched, and dropped to the floor. He patrols the edges of the cabinet in the hall, probing that inch of darkness between furniture and floor, flicking his tail expectantly. The game is still afoot, you see. There’s a mouse in the house.

Perhaps the giftee scampers slower now, and I can catch it and put it out.

I didn’t write a blog post last weekend because I was drafting pandemic flu flyers instead, for very limited distribution in my town. The copy was distilled from Flu Wiki’s materials for Pandemic Flu Awareness Week and information at pandemicflu.gov. I just can’t stand it that people all around me here have no clue that a pandemic is a very real possibility and are thus in no way preparing. In the course of less than a week, those flu flyers have been adapted for different audiences and locales in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. They’ve been been viewed online hundreds of times; thousands of copies have been made; versions are even finding their way, with much able help, into a few newspapers here and there, potentially extending their reach to several millions.

I had not grasped the potential that people working together through the Internet have for effecting such feats. I sat down last Sunday morning, cross-legged on my bed, determined only to do a small useful thing in my town and in my neighborhood and, as an additional step, sought feedback and posted a link to the flyer in the discussion forum on Flu Wiki. Flu Wiki itself began with a small group of individuals who envisioned the Wiki as means by which people could put their heads together, solve problems, educate the public, and encourage preparedness.

In view of the week’s events, I cannot help but think of Gandalf’s words to Bilbo Baggins at the end of The Hobbit, “You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!” I’ve never thought of myself as being anything other than “quite a little fellow.” That entirely suites my somewhat retiring personality.

Though Bilbo was grateful to hear Gandalf say this, it is becoming ever clearer that the world needs a lot of little fellows to do what they can. Apparently, the Director of the CDC agrees. In a recent post entitled “This blog can save your life!,” Jay Bernhardt considers the role of the new media in raising public awareness of health issues. Here is an excerpt:

Above and beyond real-time information gathering and message dissemination, the social and community qualities of new media can advance health and risk communication by changing how we understand our problems and how we construct our solutions. News groups, chat rooms, and bulletin boards have been used for exchanging health information and as online support groups since the earliest days of the web. Today’s Web 2.0 tools that leverage and harness the “knowledge of the crowd” offer great potential for solving our most difficult public health problems and building and empowering communities of change. One great example is FluWiki, whose stated purpose is “to help local communities prepare for and perhaps cope with a possible influenza pandemic, [which is] a task previously ceded to local, state and national governmental public health agencies.”

Controlling and mitigating public health emergencies, especially those that are the size and scale of an influenza pandemic, will absolutely require the active engagement and participation of the public and all sectors of society. New media efforts to engage and galvanize the public like FluWiki, Green Hammer, and the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog are critical to CDC’s ability to prepare for and respond to an influenza pandemic and to other possible public health emergencies.

Flu Wiki is, as far as I can tell, the most active pandemic flu-related community, though it is hardly the only laudable pandemic flu forum, and several excellent blogs focus regularly on H5N1 news. Any one person doing what he or she can makes a difference. Any group working together multiplies results many times over.

One might wish, however, that the biggest fellows, for their part, would do more, and in a timely manner. Too many of those flyers, paid for by volunteers and vastly insufficient in number, will end up in the trash, tossed there by people who are waiting for a clearer, louder, official word which may well come too late. No one can say precisely when a pandemic will emerge, but we are surely standing at the brink, peering into a tragic probability.

On Tuesday I planted trees, three little apple trees, an Enterprise, an Arkansas Black, and a Williams Pride. These are the last trees I will plant, for I’m running out of room on my half acre. In fact, I would have to move some things around just to situate them. The crabapples I planted three years ago had their bark mostly stripped off by a deer, and at least one was clearly just about ready to give up. That one could go. I dug it up and planted a tree in its place. The other has fared a little better, and I like its mostly burgundy foliage, but really, one of the little apple trees needed to be where it stood. The burgundy crabapple could go farther toward the back of the lot, near the woods, and perhaps it would survive. The trunk is badly damaged, but I’ve let a sucker grow tall, swathed in burgundy leaves at the top and green ones further down, and my plan is to saw off the original tree and let the sucker grow to replace it.

I fetched my shovel. Getting a tree out of the ground that has been three years in the ground is not a small endeavor, but it is not as hard as I imagined it would be. I stopped short when I saw the spider.

She was exactly the sort of spider that terrified me when I was a little girl; she was nearly three inches long, black and yellow, with a smart gray velvet vest and black evening gloves. She’d woven her elaborate web from the trunk of the tree to the ground, and there she sat, guarding her tree, in all her eight-legged magnificence.

I took the shovel and explained to her that I had to move the tree. (I talk to creatures, being somewhat short of people.) I tore at her web with the shovel, being careful not to hurt her. I didn’t want to kill her. I didn’t want to tear her web - I know what hard work it is to make a home - but the apple tree had to be planted, and the crabapple had to move. She scuttled with alarming speed up onto the tree. She was clearly devoted to the tree and would not abandon it, whatever came.

What came was a lot of digging and heaving and hoing. She managed to hang on. Keeping a eye on her whereabouts, I gingerly moved her, tree and all, and planted her tree once again. I decided to wait until spring to saw off the original trunk. Planting done and tree quakes over, she hung quite still, as if traumatized.

I wonder what she will do in winter. Today it is suddenly cold, about 35 degrees out. I’ll mulch the trees; perhaps she can burrow into the hardwood mulch and keep warm.

In my neck of the woods, pandemic flu is hardly mentioned anymore. Sad, too, since the threat grows rather than decreases, despite the media’s short attention span. (In some places, such as Fort Wayne, Texas, the coverage is good and preparedness efforts are underway. In some other places, though, people are being left to believe that the threat came and went like Y2K or is hardly to be taken seriously.)

So then, just in time for the Halloween season, here’s some scary truth in the form of a Pandemic Flu Flyer to contemplate, investigate, and act upon. I hope you pass it on. Why wouldn’t friends tell friends in time for them to prepare, considering what the alternative might turn out to be?

A higher res version suitable for printing and copying can be found here.