Some stories become mantras over the years, such as that first day of December when my younger sister was born it was 60 degrees and my mother brought her home in a light blanket. And then other stories are more of an impression, an image, the details hazy. Such as this stuffed mouse. Was it the year my sister was born? Her second year? It was early on. She needed a stocking made to join the rest of our stockings, a felt representation cut out and glued on to try to match the others. A toy soldier guarded the front of my stocking. And my brother’s. His had dark hair, mine light. We made a girl on my sister’s new stocking, in a purple dress with blond curly hair. But this mouse, one of many stuffed ornaments we made one year. Was it the same year as her stocking or another?
I remember cutting out the patterns and my mother running the sewing machine as we helped stuff the white fluff. This was not the white angel hair my mother used on the bookcase shelves in the living rooms, the substance I was warned away from as the filaments could get embedded in my fingers. Or maybe it was slice my fingers. Either way, I was to be careful. But I loved decorating. That mid-December tearing apart of the house, removing everything from bookshelves and replacing the books with wintery and nativity scenes. Porcelain mice building snowmen, pulling each other in sleds, ice skating around ceramic ginger bread houses. The wise men made to wait in the wings until Epiphany. And everything framed in twinkle lights.
By the time our cat, Wheezie, came to live with us, these ornaments were old, and we hung them low on the tree so she could bat them and carry them off to her hiding places. I can’t remember what the other stuffed ornaments looked like, or what happened to them, but I always loved this one, saved it somewhere along the way, and I still hang it on the lower branches of my tree. Mister Mouse in his sleeping cap, snug in a patchwork stocking, holding a tinier stocking in his paws. Waiting for a cat to come snatch him.
