An Unexpected Twist of Events - Reaching the Interior
Wednesday, January 4, 2006 – Louis Braille Day
[6:43am] Monday night had been great fun – OLeif, Collette, Carrie-Bri, and Rose over with their second family, the English house. Eve had made brownies and the whole family was there that evening for them to gather around for a good long game of Cranium (minus Eleda, Lonnie, and Leia who were all sleeping). Jules was up for awhile as the game became too loud, and Mrs. English went to retrieve him from the bedroom; he snacked on cheese-its while the game continued.
The teams were divided into (going clockwise around the table beginning at the bottom of the table facing the kitchen): OLeif, Diana, and Eve on Team 1, Carrie-Bri, Mr. English, and Judah on Team 2 (who naturally won the game), Collette, Mrs. English, and Tor on Team 3, and Bing, Annamaria, and Rose on Team 4 (by far the most unusual and quietly studied-team). The game lasted a good while and they didn’t shove off till ten-twenty.
And meanwhile, Collette (who sat next to Judah) reminisced with him over past things:
“Do you remember that one time you came over and babysat us, Collette?” Judah asked. “The time Tor and I were arguing over the A/C (because we took turns setting it). One night I would do it, the next night Tor would do it. But my turn was skipped so we were arguing, and then you told us that we could share it.”
“I do remember that, I think,” Collette smiled, thinking back on past times.
And then Judah went on to ask her what she thought of the color of the walls (which had been stripped of their wallpaper) and re-painted cranberry red in the living room, evergreen in the front hall, and Wedgwood in the hall bathroom (which had also been re-tiled). Judah was very proud of their redesign and they all congratulated him on the new colors, which were quite nice. He also showed her the new shelf he had put together and stained for Annamaria for Christmas, and the little jewelry rack which Tor had made for Eleda. They all drew names for Christmas, as the Snicketts’ side of the family once did as well.
Meanwhile, Tuesday was spent teaching Joe and Rose how to read Shakespeare aloud while Rose goofed off as usual. Apparently she was telling Linnea ridiculous things again, because Linnea came through the living room at one point in the morning and asked her:
“Rose, can I see the toe with eyes?”
And Rose showed her the toe, which apparently had eyes on it, somewhere. Collette did not care to look.
Later, Collette heard Rose telling Joe about another incident involving herself and Carrie-Bri:
“I was so bad, that she cut a huge whole in my (pajama) pants and then she wrote “brat” on them.”
Joe was once again inclined to laugh in disbelief. Soon later, he and Collette drove quickly over to Blockbuster where Collette purchased a previewed “Merchant of Venice” with her ten dollars from Grandma Snicketts for Christmas, along with four of Joe’s loaned dollars. And she had Joe and Rose watch it for school that morning, as an easy way back into the semester.
Later, as they watched (before they left for choir) she tried to explain the significance of a certain line in the film, regarding Antonio’s loss of the bond:
“Guys, he lost his ships at sea…”
“Well, he’d better go find them,” Rose interrupted.
And a great find had been made by Carrie-Bri. Hunting through facebook for old friends on her new account (recommended by Diana), she stumbled across the inevitable, the infamous, and the angel of the century – Ernest January. The screams that went up when his profile was revealed, were quite astonishing, but expected.
“Well, Carrie, you have now reached the interior,” Collette laughed later, as Carrie came across pictures taken at their Christmas celebration on his sister’s open photo page.
His profile was naturally closed, as she was not on his friend list, but she spent a good part of the day hunting up old people. Collette even found a number of kids from her old Sunday School class at Kirk including the nicest boy she had ever met there – Hoshaiah Grance, and a trouble-maker (Biff Goose), Eulalia Barette, Pippie Gullables, Susie Suet, Kite-Belinda Sops, Harper Twice, Talia Feathers, and others. Carrie ran across Wisteria Sparrow, Sylvester Raven, and Merci Pearl… It was a day of finding old friends.
And all through dinner, Carrie-Bri was dreamy-eyed, passing the dishes of baked Alaskan cod and fresh green beans, etc. in quite a daze. Dad did not even ask. Although Carrie had already shown everypne the new desktop picture by the time they did sit down to dinner.
But earlier, they had dropped by Trader Joe’s and Carrie had selected two bags of fresh baby spring leafy greens, a box of whopping fat blackberries, and a carton of peanut butter cups (some of which Dad snuck after dinner). And Frances (who was not feeling well) opted for chocolate banana pops while Linnea chose strawberry juice pops and plopped the box into her miniature shopping cart. There were also cranberry and blueberry sparklers to go along with dinner which Collette and Carrie cracked open early as they spent the remainder of the evening before dinner, searching for old friends.
But the bigger news of the week, was that Dad was flying to Australia for certain, for a business trip. He would leave the twenty-seventh of January and return February 4th, the day before his 48th birthday. The Big Bad Dad “Down Unda.”
And as Collette continued rearranging the apartment that night, Diana called requesting the website where she had ordered her bridesmaid dresses (as Velvet Law was preparing to select her own for her upcoming wedding). And OLeif worked on revising photos for his deviant art site (which he hadn’t touched in months). And in other news, Linnea had purchased a package of pirate pencils (all black with skull and cross-bones laced from top to bottom) at the Carnival Supply Store.
[10:46am] Meanwhile, back tutoring again, Collette was administering mathematics flashcards to Joe and Rose. It had become a sort of competition. After asking another sum in the midst of a sequence, Rose blurted out of the blue:
“Beluga whale!”
“No, Rose,” Collette said condescendingly, after a moment of surprised (yet expected) pause, “seven plus six is not a Beluga whale.”
And the session continued with an assigned one-hour hand-written essay on John Harold Johnson. As Collette set them to work, she looked outside and happened to notice the ivy crawling up the trees – the same ivy planted eight months earlier for Kitts’ wedding shower. For being labeled “fast-growing,” it had yet to live up to its name. Some strands had grown a good eighteen inches or so, but most still lay creeped together in little piles at the base of the trees.
There was something so subtly pleasing with little things grouped together in odd and assorted ways, such as the following Collette ran across that morning in Light from Heaven.
“During their year at the farm…she’d decided to accomplish three lifetime goals: learn needlepoint, make perfect oven fries, and read War and Peace.”
Just simple combinations…
Meanwhile, Carrie-Bri had come knocking at the back door with a lighter in her hand, shivering (her face quite red).
“What were you doing out there?” Collette asked her, as she hurried in, barefoot.
“Oh, you didn’t see the ceremony? I was lighting the yellow, green, and purple smoke bombs of Aram Breena, and then I hung… the bell. It was the ceremony Kitts and I were supposed to do together.”
Ah, yes, their society of the trees, most particularly the tree house.
Later, from the living room, Collete heard Mom’s attempts to teach Joe and Rose history.
“What ‘the pope’ are we doing?” Joe asked amidst the confusion of the animals and kids all thrown together in one room, imitating Aristotle George’s latest phrase of wit and class.
“Hey, Mom, I’m wickel-icious!” Rose would exclaim from time to time, using her own phrase incorporated into various trains of thought, though none very well connected.
According to Joe, the entire Hobcoggin family had adopted the word as well, and Collette wondered just how much longer the craze would last.
Other things of note: Mom received from UPS a white 1920’s tin bread box which read “BREAD” across the front. And lunch was spent reminiscing over the “good old days,” including the time when Carrie-Bri was known to have fondly said to Diana:
“I wish you would fall through a trap-door and disappear.”
“It’s as important to marry the right life as it is the right person… This was the cream of marriage, this nightly turning out the pocketful of memories, this deft, habitual sharing of two pairs of eyes, two pairs of ears. It gave you, in a sense, almost a double life: though never, on the other hand, quite a single one.” – Mrs. Miniver
“Is this dying? Is this all? Is this what I feared when I prayed against a hard death? Oh, I can bear this! I can bear it!” – Cotton Mather