Just for the record, French lentils are quite small. I had bought some last summer because I had a good recipe for a French lentil salad, actually.  But there is a limit to the number of French lentil salads one can eat in a summer, and so I had a supply of French lentils in the pantry here in Maine.

Then they disappeared.  Until yesterday when I put on...or TRIED to put on..these boots. The left one fit fine.  The right one....

...well, it was full of French lentils.

I haven't been up here at the farm since Christmas. So it has been four weeks. That is four weeks during which a mouse...mice?...a troop of mice?....carefully moved an astonishing number of French lentils all the way across the kitchen and into the laundry room, and from there into a closet where these boots were stored.

I am currently not hostile toward mice despite my bad poetry about them in the past ("Here's your dinner, take your pick: Cyanide, or Arsenic?") because last summer I had a wonderful mouse encounter with a very CUTE mouse who was so unafraid he allowed me to photograph him with my dog...  and then I went off and wrote a book in which similarly sweet mice are the main characters.  (coming next year from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Tentative title: Bless This Mouse)

So I am more bemused than freaked out by the March of the French Lentils.

That is not Alfie in the photo, by the way, but a doorstop that resembles him.