Add it Up
An image of Puck walking out to the car this morning – striped sweater over collared shirt with clip-on tie , a sandwich bag filled with pea gravel under one arm. Cross-eyed. I don’t ask questions.
Well.
Sometimes.
We polished off a sermon on hell – which was actually very sound and good, I might add – with an hour of brevity in the nursery. Nursery = sitting on a chair watching wordless toddlers throw plastic tomatoes and butter sticks across rubber mats at each other.
Pizzas and Reeses jack ‘o lantern ice cream bars waited at the house.
Because the day was gray and cool and beautiful, Grandma Combs arrived at two. We were driving out to Castlewood for a picnic. These are beautiful woods, even before the premiere. All the right colors seeping out of green and yellow. Ready to burst, but not just. Rose, Francis, and Linnea trucked off Puck with walking sticks to the river. I wasn’t there to witness his first reaction to a “beach”, but the joy was excessive.
“I saw a beach, Mama!” he exclaimed, cupping a shiny white and black half-shell in one hand.
“He plopped himself down in the sand,” said Rose. “He should probably wash his hands, yeah…”
I shook out a round of badminton with Mom and The Bear until we broke exercise for juice. Then even Grandma marched off with two stout sticks to the river accompanied by Mom and Dad not long before dinner. “Even”. Since when does Grandma turn down an adventurous proposition?
Mom had created a crock-pot of “White Castle” sandwiches, accompanied by deviled eggs, corn chips, and a chocolate pudding cake from Grandma for dessert. Joe blasted circles around us on his mountain bike, spinning up plumes of cracked leaves and damp undergrowth. Until Rose picked up a racquet. Nature went flying everywhere.
“What are you doing?”
“Cleaning this thing up. There are bugs everywhere. Ack!”
She ringed a surprisingly fat millipede around a stick to the groans of the double picnic table. This led Carrie to tell tale of giant electrocuting-spitting-worms in Mongolia that terrify the nomads. Darned old weird world. The boys threw things at each other – berries, bits of things. I think. That’s pretty much a standard set. And the jar of pickles “somehow” landed in the rubble. Ten guesses who did it.
Grandma coaxed a family sing-along to “My Girl” on the ride back. No one was biting, except for The Bear and Joe’s random-off-timed dead-panned hand-clap contribution, which only got Grandma laughing harder.