THE PARLOR is a new series on The Milk House that embraces the lighter side of rural life. You can find a new piece by a different author the first Saturday of every month.
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During the house-building process I had also been writing my PhD dissertation. While complementary metaphorically, it is not a combination I’d recommend. The constant interruptions by phone from carpenters and other trades people are not conducive to deep thoughts. Still, it was nice to have something to look forward to, the long drive every two to three days to see the physical house progress—it was more substantial than pages of text on the computer screen.
A mild winter allowed the construction to be completed on time, and we moved into the new house in early spring. Having spent a year listening to the complaints of anyone without a four wheel drive (4WD) truck (and some who did) as to how steep and inaccessible was the driveway, we installed a “package shed” at the end of it—a wooden box with a flap door cover and a handwritten sign “Packages for #364.” Later the cover would fall victim to a deep snowdrift and an overeager Fed Ex monkey, but at this point in its existence it worked well. Except in the one case of my doctoral diploma, arguably the most expensive package it would ever receive.
The package shed was relatively small and most packages caused the door to be propped open. In any case, we checked it but occasionally. Until one day I opened it to find a fuzzy mouse nest and some cute mice. At least I thought they were cute until I saw that their nest had Latin on some of it, and UPS labeling on the rest. It was my diploma along with its cardboard mailing envelope.
Nature had eaten my credentials.
Getting a replacement was easier than I thought—the story of “mice ate my diploma” elicited laughter and sympathy in normally hard-hearted red-tape-bound administrators.
I filed the pristine replacement copy away in a safe place, and hung the original in my study, whose nibbled edges and holes remind me (in the words of Dar Williams) of “Who I am, and where I am now.”
Lis is editor of the Writing the Land anthologies, available here.
Learn more about Lis on our Contributors’ Page.
(Photo: Paul Gulliver/ flickr.com/ CC BY-ND 2.0)
- THE PARLOR: Mouse Diploma by Lis McLoughlin - January 7, 2023