Mouse Lady

I had another encounter with the mouse lady. Yesterday. I didn’t realize it was her; that’s how tired I was.

My dad and I were sitting outside, near the St. Francis Center entrance. A woman came out very straight-backed, serious air. She sat down and said, “I just wanted to see who was out here.”

And we said, “OK, yeah.”

She said, “It’s not because I’m nosy. It’s because I’m blind.”

Blind? Hmmm. She didn’t strike me as having a problem with her sight. She had no cane, no walking stick, no walker, nothing. She didn’t reach about to feel for the chair when sitting down. I thought she looked familiar but I’ve been coming here long enough to where most of the people look familiar, because they are.

She remarked on how nice a day we were having, the weather. She asked where we were from. Not from St. Francis, she observed. And now I know where she was coming from, what she was getting at. She’s a wasp. I’m a wasp. Her tendency is also mine. To be curious to a fault. To gate-keep.

“My dad’s in Dammert,” I told her. “We like to come out here for the view.”

Then she started talking about wanting to see some of the area cleared. The vines, their tangle, the brush. This is the area you see when you look out, west, southwest, from the St. Francis Center entrance. My dad would start calling it Porcupine Hill. Why, I don’t know. And he wasn’t calling it Porcupine Hill yet. This was only April of 2024.

“There’s a lot of trash in there,” she said. And her curiosity furthered. She wanted to know what else was down there, what was hidden in those woods. She suspected, she said, that a number of homeless people were living in those woods, down the hill, toward the train tracks, between The Shrine and Route 157.

I said I’d been down there, and I had. There’s a loop road all the way around the property. If you take it down the hill, down toward the tracks. It’s a really nice place to walk. I told ML I didn’t see any evidence of homeless people. The idea of anyone living out there seemed improbable, but not impossible. This was a couple months before my parents reported seeing what they described as a panther. Turns out it was a bear. But that’s a story for another day.

I told Mouse Lady that my dad and I enjoyed sitting there and watching the air traffic from nearby Parks Airport. And, with spring in full swing, we liked listening to the plentiful and varied birdsong.

“There are birds,” she said. “And if you’re lucky, you’ll see deer. And if you’re really lucky, you’ll see a feral cat.”

My dad and I had just seen the cat. A coy but formidable orange white and black large, wild cat. Circumspect. It had crossed the dead-end gravel service road back there, and it gave us a look before vanishing into the brush.

“The cat seems like it has been able to find plenty to eat,” I said. This was before signs went up saying not to put food out, you never know what you might attract, i.e. bears. In Illinois.

“Several residents do put food out,” she said.

I just nodded, she was one of them.

“Have you seen the solar panels?” she asked me.

“Sure,” I said.

There is an array of solar panels on a hillside as you make your way through Our Lady of The Snows Shrine, on your way back to the part of the property where the Retirement Community is located. Benedictine, it’s now called. Independent, assisted, damned. When I was lobbying my parents on the idea that my dad should move from their house on Rockingham to an assisted living facility or a nursing home, my mom went and visited The Shrine but denounced the possibility, at least in part because of the solar panels.

“They had to cut down a lot of trees to clear that lot for the panels,” said Mouse Lady. “It used to be woods. Full of trees. When they cleared it out, we were invaded here by lots of mice and other vermin.”

Now it all comes back around, I thought. Mouse Lady is trying to tell my why she was so concerned when I had one of the main building’s courtyard doors propped very slightly open on a beautiful day when I was out in the courtyard with my dad. I was on a phone call with my deadbeat neighbor, having a decent conversation with him for the first time in a decade. He used to live there but now rents the place out. We were talking about gutters and all of a sudden this woman started flagging me down from the door I had propped open by an inch to call my attention to the problem of the door being left open.

And I got into it with her a little bit. I told her I would do whatever I needed to do to get my dad outside so he could enjoy a beautiful day among his final days. And, besides, the doors will lock behind you if you let them close. So you have to keep them open a little bit. What’s the harm? What are you worried about getting in? And she said, “Well, mice.” I thought she was crazy. And maybe she is. Or maybe she isn’t. And maybe, just maybe, the woman who flagged me down that day wasn’t even Mouse Lady. I am not one hundred percent sure. But ML bringing up vermin, now, today, seems like too much of a coincidence.

It was getting toward lunch time. I was about to go sit in the Dammert dining room and have lunch with my dad and with Bob and with Father Volk. ML herself had somewhere to be getting along to, she said.

I started wheeling my dad back to the auto door of St. Francis. She thanked us for sitting and talking with her. As my dad and I passed by her seat she reached out and patted him on the arm. She told him how lucky he was to have a family member come and visit and take him outside on a beautiful day.

I was grateful. I stored it away. The Mouse Lady saying something nice to me. Saying something nice for all of us.

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Postscript. Her name is Ellie. She still lives in St. Francis Center. She lost her husband this past Fall I never knew his name. I still have my doubts that Ellie is in fact Mouse Lady. I am only 50/50. The mice problem must have actually existed. It was Brad who saw me getting pointed with whoever it was flagging me down that day for having the door very slightly propped open. He made a bee-line for the situation and defused it. Brad is awesome.