20 : A Contract

It must have been around six-thirty in the morning. Both my boys were wide awake, up, and looking for mild trouble. I could hear it coming before Puck said a word, sitting down on the bed next to me.

“Um, Mom?”

“Yes, Puck?”

“Well. I got a sucker this morning. But I decided I shouldn’t eat it. So I was putting it back and I noticed a little sliver of it opened already, so I had to open it and eat it.”

“Of course you did.”

Just before eleven o’clock that morning we agreed to a contract on our house. Three weeks in, and done. We hoped. Papers were electronically signed with a closing date of August 30th. Time would tell.

Meanwhile, with Mom in Columbia, everyone else was at the Big House for hair cutting, lawn mowing (Yali hitched a ride with Francis), podcasting, and pizzas and brownie-cookies. Because sometimes muggy-hot summer afternoons require a little pizza to be productive.

To round out another steam bath of a day, Puck and I discussed Cain and Abel that evening before his bedtime.

“You know, Mom, apples and fruits and things like that are okay for people, but for God?! You kind of need something more special!”

“Well…”

“Except that the poor woman who gave God everything she had, just those little coins… So even though that wasn’t a lot, it was a good thing to do. So God just wants us to give Him everything that we have.”

“Well… Everything is God’s, right? He gives us these good things to use. But it doesn’t necessarily mean we take all the money out of our bank account and put it in the offering plate.”

“Yeah! I mean, when I was little, I saw people putting all that money into the offering plate and I was like, ‘People are giving money to GOD?’ But then a few years later, like five years, I realized that that money goes to missionaries and things like that.”

This kid teaches himself.