Longtime educators Jim and Nancy Barnes live near Paradise Lake, and over the years Jim has been telling the story of wise Little Mouse the Mouse (who also happens to live near Paradise Lake) in a series of children's books. Little Mouse's thoughtfulness is no accident; even as a youngster his problem-solving skills are quite evident.
And young Little Mouse the Mouse does have a big problem. "A flying boulder/ With speed and glee/ Had landed on top/ Of a teeny golf tee.// As bad as that was/ As you can see/ It cuddled up to Little Mouse's home/ Within a width of a flea."
The whimsical story is told with Jim's pen and pencil drawings in "What Now, Little Mouse, Rocky, Wolfy And Flea?" ($7.99 in paperback, self-published; the Amazon link is available through littlemousethemouse.com/index.html.) The same book, without any shading in the illustrations, is available in "The 'What Now?' Coloring Book" ($7.99 in paperback).
We've already met Flea. Enter neighbor Wolf, who thinks it's child's play to blow the boulder away. But then Rocky awakens: "'Huff and puff all you want./ I'm not going anywhere!'" Rocky is not exactly accommodating. "'It's so relaxing and airy,/ This tee hits the spot.'"
But young Little Mouse suspects there's more going on, something bugging Rocky, "problems that we can't see." Indeed so; Rocky admits that "'Before I landed on this tee/ ... I was mostly underground/ And feeling quite blue.'"
When the backhoe came and dug Rocky out of the ground, he tells Little Mouse, Wolf, and Flea, he realized "'We rocks get no respect. We only catch a lot of heck.'// 'We're dug up, pushed around, and shoved aside....'"
But, says Little Mouse, rocks are actually very important. "'Take for instance Butte Creek,/ Over the cliff and to your right./ Your boulder kin have played/ Their part in a special delight.'// 'For if it weren't for rocks and boulders,/ There'd be no sounds and sites--/ Ripples, rainbow-waterfalls, bridges,/ And the deep holes that fish like."
Does that, uh, turn the tide?
Well, the moral of the story may well be: When in doubt, communicate. Be a little boulder.
