3 : Feeling Like Home

I heard the boys whispering together on the floor near the bed early that morning. My built-in alarm clocks. Sometimes way too early. But mostly on weekends, only. Yali had been up since four-something, and now – sometime later – Puck was still trying to get him to fall asleep on a pile of blankets, just for grins I guess.

“Are you hyper?” he asked in a surprisingly quiet sing-song voice. “Are you hyper, buddy?”

Yali’s answer was to jump around on the pillows.

Later, getting ready for church, I heard all three of my boys in the kitchen, breakfasting.

“Dad, could we get a platypus?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know how to take care of a platypus.”

“Well, they’re poisonous anyway, you know.”

Rain, gray skies in between, and a little more rain. More September than August.

Back at the Big House after the service, Carrie-Bri had sausage-potato-kale soup and yeast rolls ready for lunch. I set the boys up in the living room with bowls, the 70s TV tray Puck always uses, and the Olympics. When I returned with their drinks, Puck had his feet propped up on the couch watching golf. And he wasn’t complaining about it either.

About one-thirty we joined our realtor a little north of Olive to check out three last house options, hit-and-miss with the rain as we toured. For every option, Puck’s reactions were the same.

“LET’S BUY THIS HOUSE!”

Followed five minutes later by, “I DON’T WANT TO BUY THIS HOUSE!”

He always had some black and white reason for it, including, “This feels too much like an old person’s house.”

In the end, out of the seven places we checked out the past five weeks, we were pretty confident which one felt like home.