The Last Straw or The Last Mouse

Several years ago, unbeknowst to us, mice invaded our garage.  Thanks to a gap at the bottom of the garage door, the mice had easy access to a nice warm winter resort complete with birdseed.  After doing what mice do so well, reproducing, we finally noticed their presence.  A phone call was made to the exterminator.  Unfortunately, our city must have been experiencing a mouse infestation of gigantic proportions because the next appointment was ten days away.
   A lot can happen in ten days.  Mice can chew through the dry wall in the garage and get into the house.  Mice can get in the heating ducts and make scratchy sounds all night.  They can also torment cats and small terriers who chase them until they stand still and then the larger animals leave them alone because they don't know what to do next.
  We were well and truly under attack by the rodent population before the exterminators arrived.  We coped.  My daughter and I would scream and jump onto the nearest piece of furniture when we saw one scurrying across the floor. My son would stick his head out of his bedroom door and ask why we making such a racket.  We would reply that we had seen a mouse and could he please come deal with said frightening creature.  "Hell no" would come the reply followed by a door slam.  This routine became more and more frequent as the days passed.
   Early one evening I decided to do laundry and sent out the call for dirty laundry to be deposited on the floor in front of the washing machine.  It took a while for the laundry to be collected and for me to remember what I was supposed to be doing.  Several hours later I began loading the sorted piles into the machine.  Just as I was getting ready to pour the detergent in, I noticed something odd.   There was a small grey face looking up at me from the clothes.  It had whiskers and small pink ears.  It was indeed a mouse.  This time I did not scream.  I started to cry. 
  I know how to deal with many things in life, including home repairs.  But I had no idea what to do about a mouse in a washing machine.  It was the last straw in a long day.  I stood looking at that creature for ten minutes while tears rolled down my face.  The children checked in on me to see why I was crying.  However they were teenage wimps, not up to the challenge of mouse retrieval. 
    I debated washing the mouse, but discarded that idea quickly.  Wet dead mouse was even less appealing than a live dry mouse. The only sensible thing to do, I thought as I snuffled, was to get it out alive and release it over the back fence into the wild.  It took some doing, a ice cream pail with a lid, and some blue air, but I got it done. 
   The laundry came out clean and fresh with no signs of mouse anywhere.  The exterminators came the next day and rid us of the pesky creatures.  They were never seen again.  Far removed from the adventure, it strikes me as extremely funny.  Distance and time help heal the pain.  To this day when I encounter one of those "last straws" I remember the stupid mouse.  It puts things in perspective.