Back on the Ranch
Friday, September 28, 2007
Collette and Puck arrived at the house Friday morning to the usual hubbub when Mom was out of town.
Frances was already out with his potato guns, shooting rubber ducks into the treetops.
“I think you must be giving it a heart attack,” Collette said, as they watched the duck hit the top of the persimmon tree and land with a thud by the house.
“No,” Frances explained. “He’s our veteran duck. He’s already been on three launches.”
While Collette began math with Frances, Dad shortly returned with Rose from her Introduction to Educational Psychology exam at UMSL.
“Passed,” she said, satisfied.
“I’ve got to go,” Dad said, as soon as he walked in the door, after setting a pile of books on the kitchen counter. “Have papers to sign.”
Yes, Dad had been offered the two to three year contract. He would possibly be flying out to Denver Monday morning as an initial introduction to the company – a Dutch bank recently gone international, from what Collette understood.
Rose and Carrie prepared to leave for work.
“Ah, man!” Carrie was in a rush. “There’s no way I can read 75 pages of stuff every week for this class and read forty articles every week and respond eighty times to the other students’ articles every week. My professor’s insane!”
Carrie ran out the door while Collette proofed her next research paper.
Frances was outside shooting empty glue tubes into the air. Collette heard a splat.
“Oops!”
“Frances, what just happened?”
“I think it landed in the neighbor’s yard.”
“What’s for lunch?” Joe had returned from picking up Carrie’s new black mountain bike and began adjusting the tires.
“Don’t know…” Collette was in the middle of Carrie’s paper on Polio.
“I’m hungry!” Frances came in.
The house must have exploded since Mom left early Thursday morning. Stuff lay strewn everywhere.
Collette briefly abandoned the reading of Carrie’s paper and fed Puck lunch, put him down for his afternoon nap, and told Frances his mathematics would be postponed until the afternoon. In the kitchen she alternately prepared pasta and crescent rolls for lunch, washed the dishes, and continued proofing Carrie’s paper. Then, through a series of phone calls, she heard from the March family (who were watching the animals while the Silverspoons were in Tennessee), that the key they had been given to the Silverspoon house, did not work.
“Frances, what happened to the neighbor’s yard?” Collette asked him as he walked by.
“Uhhh…. The glue bottle exploded.”
“Go knock on their door, explain what happened, and clean it up. And no more bottle rockets.”
“Aw.”
While Frances went to clean up the glue spill on their front lawn, Collette checked messages on the phone, as several calls had been missed during the upheaval of the morning. One message included a last-minute invitation for Linnea to go with the Pie family to Chuck E. Cheese’s. After calling Linnea inside, having her change her clothes, pulling her hair into a ponytail, and telling her to bring a jacket, Collette asked Joe to drive her. And Collette bundled up Puck to return the car early to OLeif so that he could bring Wally’s car key to the Marchs so that they could get the garage door opener from inside his car and get inside to feed the animals.
By the end of the day, Collette hit the hay after watching “Paradise Now” with OLeif, who stayed up to midnight designing logos for the church’s various projects.