I Am a Small Mouse

I am a small mouse
crouching in the grass, pink ears
trembling, sky too large.

This haiku, along with a poster-sized illustration of a small mouse in large grass, hangs on the east wall of my bedroom.

I have never written anything more self-descriptive.

Several years ago, I submitted the haiku to Red Cedar, the literary magazine put out by the University of Wisconsin in Barron. It was accepted, and one of the students there, as part of her class assignment, chose to illustrate it. When class was finished, she rolled up her drawing and put it in the mail to me. So now it hangs on the wall of my bedroom, my very own self portrait.

“Whenever life gets hard, when I’m scared about things or someone hurts me, I just make myself very small,” I told Dad one evening not long ago. We were cleaning the Jump River Electric offices, as we do several times a week, and talking while we worked. “I just make myself very small and think, The smaller you are, the easier this will be.”

Because small people don’t matter. Small people can’t get hurt because there is nothing to step on, no ego to bruise. Small people are not even there, or just barely.

But I didn’t have to explain this to Dad–my dad, the quiet one as a boy who spent hours sculpting faces, who wrote love poetry to my mom when they were dating, who even now is constantly reading. My dad knew exactly what I meant. “But most people don’t know how to do that,” he said. “Most people aren’t like us.”

We are strong, we small people. We are not strong like oak or strong like iron; we are strong like moss, like the soft green sponginess of ground which bounces back up immediately after someone has stepped on it. The large ones break and tumble and crash; we small ones only watch. Sometimes we extend a paw, when it looks as though they want it.

Small people are the watchers: they see the sun come up, the small wetness on the edge of the blades of grass, the thin white hairs on their own tiny feet.

They do not believe they have a handle on life; they do not believe themselves to know why the sun comes up or why the grass is wet; they only know that it does and it is, and that it is beautiful, and that it hurts them and thrills them at the same time.

They lift their ears, quivering.

This is what small ones do.