Daughter Lise and I came down gently after the wedding. Daughter Kate stayed another day and then broke her record time getting back to New Jersey. After about 13 hours of driving and a night’s sleep, she was at work at 7:15 the following morning.

Lise had done handyman things before the wedding, like fixing a toilet and replacing a broken doorknob to that bathroom. Guests didn’t have to dread going to an unsecured room! I had planned to change the water filter to the refrigerator, but thankfully I didn’t try to do it by myself. We pulled the heavy appliance to the middle of the room, and that’s when the fun began. There are people who can’t handle the thought of a mouse in the house. Lise is one of those. (For me, it’s big spiders.)

What neither of us thought about was the camera that is trained on the two doors into the kitchen. She thought of it the next day, and the gales of laughter began. She flipped through the cam videos showing us moving around the refrigerator, getting up and down off the floor, and shoving the fridge back in place. When Lise saw a dead mouse, she didn’t shriek or faint, but she did mutter quietly. I picked up the carcass with a tissue and put it in a small plastic container that I had washed the day before. As I tossed it in the kitchen garbage, I said, “If I’d known this was going to be a casket, I wouldn’t have washed it.”

The more we watched, the more we laughed. The decibels rose until we were cackling. It was an unholy noise that I hope none of the neighbors heard. There was no way we could stop until we couldn’t get enough breath to laugh more. Lise saved two of the clips. I hope she hid them, because they could be evidence that we should both be committed to the crazy house.