A Change in the Air
I, Collette Maritime Snicketts Silverspoon…
…after seven years, eight months, two weeks, and six days, succumbed to my personal weakness of first person. And… felt a familiar ache in my knee at 3:20 Thursday morning. OLeif had suggested the idea of lightening in the air earlier that night. Somewhere nearby, maybe rain had, or was, falling. But this kind of pain won’t easily allow one to sleep, so out came the prettier identical twin sister to Bengay – Icy Hot. And eventually, I continued my dreams, transferring from the first feature – ancient foreign buildings laced with intricate, mostly broken, ceiling pulley systems – to the second: baseball, baseball, baseball.
As I stacked away clean dishes and utensils later that morning, air-dried in the night, I realized that the paring knife had been bent at the tip of the blade. Probably been used to unscrew something.
Boys.
The morning continued with a blend of Puck-requested Minnesota-based Vacation Bible School kid-rock, and Puerto Rican club music. Well. Who knows what it is, really. Aside from the fact that I can still only barely say more than, “Yes, I speak English” in español under pressure… even if all the lyrics are conveniently in my native tongue, I can rarely pick out the actual words set to music… of any kind.
Except for Mr. Rogers’.
Either that, or my mind wanders, and I realize I haven’t heard a thing. I usually just consult OLeif the Bear for explanation… who tossed another forgotten lunch tupperware out the car window as he backed down the driveway this morning with a big dumb grin on his face.
Boys.
Then Puck came plunging through the galley kitchen in a giggling contusion of cats, large rubber ball, and whacking stick, towards the full glass of milk still left on the table.
Splash.
Boys.
Cats.
I sort of pinned the mischief down long enough to work in half a reading lesson with Puck, which he followed up with one of those nasty rock-hard crumbly iced oatmeal cookies from the place that shall never be named. Call me a snoot, but there is nothing appealing to any of my senses in the warehouse that inadvertently professes – maybe to unsuspecting green card holders – to sell walls. Puck, by the way, can read whole stories now, which I’ve come to realize, stemming from this particular dirty-toed-hairy-legged-scabby-kneed son of OLeif, is more a result of intelligent guessing than anything else.
The other half of the morning I wasted swatting after the same fruit fly who has somehow managed to live to 73, in fruit-fly years. You’d think I’d feel a little guilty for hunting down a grandpa of any species. Which… I didn’t so much, until I found it smashed in my hand later that day.
While Puck cajoled me into cracking open the inner organs of the somehow-gnawed key remote to the dearly departed ’02 Civic, which I had for some reason, kept – who’d of thought I’d find myself a little sentimental over an old Honda…
“Dude, I’m not taking the battery out of this thing,” I explained, already irritated with other matters, like the mini archipelago of gray cat hair and general feline fuzz distributed over the linoleum in the past three hours.
“Good, Mama,” was my son’s response. “Because batteries are very dangerous for little children. Yes, very dangerous, indeed.”
The five year-old.
I scraped up a conventional bowl of almonds, banana, carrots, and cheddar for Puck’s lunch, while we discussed name-thoughts for his “baby brother in Colombia”. He seemed pretty set on the idea of “Albert Pujols”…
“Please, Mama?”
…while he showed me his “coolest trick ever” – blowing a feather through a tiny bugle, which erupted into the air like a shot arrow. He went on from this unexpected-but-expected activity to prying out the floor vent in his room with an antique fork during that one hour in the middle of every day at home where I have the chance to catch up on a little peace.
This kid doesn’t ever really stop.
Anything.
About fifteen minutes later I received word that the adoption wait-period has been extended another month, which is almost a laugher, because when you were already planning to wait four years and one month on top of the seventeen months it took to complete the initial paperwork, delays, and approvals anyway, another month is like another week without rain in an extensive St. Louis summer drought.
Meanwhile, Elodie-Rose continues into her final day of her first vacation in three years in the middle of Nowhere, New Mexico. Bacon cheeseburgers, climbing sand dunes, and Boy Scouts – absent all delicate female companionship for weeks or months on end – eyes bugged three feet out from their heads.
By the end of “this kind of day”, I wasn’t surprised to watch Floozie the-mama-cat dart past, her lion markings jazzed up with sky-blue marker. She didn’t seem to care. And fortunately for Puck, I didn’t really either. Until he walked past carrying said cat in his arms with the full remorseful intention of dunking her in the tub because she was… “all markery”.
Looking in the mirror around six o’clock this evening, I kind of had that pale Flemish painting sort of coloring. Some weeks will just apply that proverbial toll, and you look back and wonder why, really…
So my evening was more a date with half a dark chocolate Hershey’s bar than anything else.
Maybe I was mistaken after all.
The dark side grows on you. Not to mention if the temperature of the house is still above 80 – just enough to hack away at the brick-tough quality of the cocoa. The consistency of thick clay is a pretty good sign that you’re almost there…
Plus a few chapters of Rob Bell’s “Velvet Elvis” – from a guy who has been liberally accused of heresy. Figured I should check it out before stocking it in our modest church library, because I am, after all, the theological authority at this 200-person farm-church wedged amongst the chunks of white-housed treeless-lawned suburbs of Greater St. Louis.
Congratulations on another exciting uproarious Thursday night, Collette…
I don’t really mind.