04 AUG 25

It's mid-morning... city strapped under a cache of Vermeer cloudscapes...

Yali has returned from labs and needles joyfully running into the house with a new kind of boxed lunch to try out with Patience...

Puck is in the basement post work-out carefully spray-painting a console addition for “Presley”... as the upstairs fills with potent fumes...

Yali bursts out of the back rooms with an... “I GOT GLASS IN MY FINGER”...

...and Patience asks to prepare chili dogs for her and Yali's lunch...

An hour later Yali is throwing himself into backflips on the trampoline... shirt soaked in fake blood spray...

...while Puck tinkers with Presley's brake light with assistance from Oxbear... before consulting with me on the first coat of paint in the basement... he adds another...

Yali and I coast back down the highway for his three-fifteen ENT appointment at the hospital... stacks of August clouds filling the blue...

After a quick cleaning and second prescription for ear drops – hands still stained pink from fake blood – stop by the tiny cafe stand on the ground floor...

Yali asks for a can of Sprite and Cool Ranch Doritos... allow it... he walks proudly beside me back to the parking garage... “Doesn't this look like something a teenager would get?” he asks holding up the snacks...

Back home Puck is dismantling Presley's steering wheel to get to the gear shifter... but he's short a tool and puts it all back together again...

Patience... who has been equally busy... pulls a glass pan of cornbread from the oven...

...joining the taco meat Oxbear is simmering down in a slow cook on the stove... kids pile in for plates of good stuff...

...while I leave for a missions festival committee meeting at church... which also includes stories from a retired reverend who helped build a church in China and pastored a church in East St. Louis...

Home in late rolls of dark lavender peach glow... kids already tucked into their bunks for the night...