12 APR 26

“PATIENCE! CAN YOU PLEASE NOT TOUCH ME! I’M TOO COOL!”

Maybe it’s a tone to set the day... Patience doesn’t seem very bothered by the scolding though... she’s familiar with outbursts of annoyance from her brothers and twenty minutes later she’s sitting in the church pew tapping out silent reels in her pearl-studded sandals against the cold tile floor during a reading from I Peter...

It’s when we get home that the unfortunate combination of a dull moment and a stray pocket lighter fuses into an...

“Uh... oops...”

Empty brown paper Amazon packet flaming on the long-ago de-varnished hardwood floor...

The smoldering ring of scorched board it leaves behind is both amusing and entirely predictable... as discussion begins about how exactly one removes fire damage from floorboards and if the effort is worth the work assuming that more is almost definitely around all the corners ahead... the house is its own tel of mischief unmanaged...

But there’s a tease of rain outside... so with the ash swept up and ramen boiling on the stove... we meander in and out to the wind and the pops of raindrops as the sun swaps howdies with the clouds back and forth... back and forth...

Boys are off with friends in the later afternoon and Oxbear’s frying chicken and hand-sliced shoestring fries in the kitchen with homemade dipping sauce... today Patience is his sous chef... and I’m piling old honeysuckle cuttings in the ash pit as the high wind blows us into evening...