All Is Grace

i have a splinter in the side of my right palm.

it freaking hurts. i dug at it with tweezers. picked at it with my nails. poked it with a pin. i proved, once again, that i am NOT ambidextrous. i put triple antibiotic and a bandaid on it last night and went to bed, hoping it wouldn’t throb all night and keep me up. it will come out eventually. but man, it is so irritating.

it was right there in all it’s swollen redness this morning when i awoke.

but wanna know how i got the splinter?

i was cleaning up a mess made by a mouse.

i think mice are adorable. Bryson has two mice (Mort and Tim. both females. yep.) in his bedroom, and he brings one of them to me when he hugs me good morning every day. we giggle about their twirly tails and how they sniff at our noses and the way they grip our fingers when we hold them. he gives them cake scraps and carrot treats, and even takes the time to put them in his closet at night so he can sleep with them still in his room (without being kept awake all night by their nocturnal silliness). they never bite. they make my boy happy.

they are pets.

the mess i cleaned up was not made by a pet mouse. a wild, drive-me-crazy mouse found its way into my basement entrance, snipped open the bottom of a bag of bird food with its sharp little teeth, and spilled half the bag on the particle board floor. i eventually used a broom to clean it up (and an airtight container to hold the swept-up seed), but my first reaction was to scoop it up with my hand. hello, splinter. hello, painful, swollen palm that brushes against everything and irritates the heck out of me. the thing is…the mouse is not only an irritant in my house, leaving its droppings and wreaking a bit of havoc wherever it goes…it caused the irritant in my skin.

i told Bryson yesterday that i would set a trap. sensitive spirit that he has, he asked if we could use a have-a-heart trap, reminding me that we had them when we moved into the house in the woods. “remember, mom? they were so CUTE!!” and they were. tiny little babies–like 13 of them–and we caught them and took them out into the woods and gave them their freedom. Reasa made the comment, “but Bryce, if we let them free here, they’ll just go into someone else’s house. we have to get rid of this mouse, or it will have babies and then lots of houses will have mice.”

i love when my kids make my arguments for me.

(they listen to each other better sometimes anyway.)

the irritants must go. the splinter first. and eventually the mouse.

but, of course…this reminded me of something (as i lay irritated by the darn splinter) while trying to fall asleep last night. there are things in my life that constantly eat at me, continually draw my attention…and like that silly mouse trap i never did bother to set yesterday, i just continue to do nothing about them. they sneak in and gnaw at my joy. they snip holes in the delicious parts of my relationships and force me to worry. they leave droppings all over the clean and pretty parts of my life, dirtying it up unnecessarily. they snipe away my peace. eventually, the bag tears and what should be inside spills out and i have a huge mess to clean up. i can play repair-man and attempt to protect what’s left, or push the problem to another spot in my brain, but that doesn’t solve the problem. the problem will resurface. only if i choose to address the issues, eliminate them before the damage is done, will i not have to do further clean-up.

irritants don’t go away because i ignore them. they don’t go away even after i do clean-up or when i put them somewhere i can’t see them. the go away when i deal with them. pluck them out and throw them away.

so, today…the splinter is out. (ouch.) the trap is set. (yikes. poor mousy.)

and i have a list of irritants to deal with. it’s not a long list…but it doesn’t have to be.

what’s on your list?