Back to the Office
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Collette was to work at the church office again, for the remainder of the week, while the current secretary visited with her family at her brother’s wedding on the beach.
But first…
On the way to the house…
“Are you going to have a good day, Puck?” Collette asked him.
“No, I’m gonna have a bad day.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause I’m sick.”
“Why are you sick?”
“‘Cause I fell into the radio.”
And when OLeif hurried back inside the house to look for his wallet and badge…
“My big friend is a little bit cranky ’cause his wallet is gone…” said Puck seriously.
Just as they arrived at the neighborhood, Puck went on…
“God made playgrounds and houses. And he made people to work on them.”
“Hey, you’re right! That’s good, Puck.”
“Yes, yes, yes. That’s very good.”
Over at the house, Carrie had plans for Puck.
“We’re going to eat a rainbow today, Puck!” she told him.
Already, she had the boxes of colored and white gelatin ready to mix into rainbow-layer Jell-O as one of the projects of the day.
At the office, things were rather quiet…
Collette spoke with Moses about Africa, and Judah about Africa, and Henri about the brochure for the youth retreat, and Daisy-Jean about how fast Francis and Linnea-Irish had grown up… about back in the day when Francis walked around with a pen in his shirt pocket like Dad always did…
Then back at the house, while Linnea-Irish and Puck chased around the chickens with the neighbor girls, Collette tried to hunt out a set of keys twenty feet up in the branches of an old tree in the front yard. Linnea-Irish had been swinging them around on her finger, up they went, and lodged somewhere in the leafy green. Collette climbed the ladder to the roof to see if they could be found. Nothing. And the keys were to the house for which Linnea was cat-sitting for several weeks…
Big news of the afternoon had arrived around three, before a litany of errands to be run… their dossier had been finally shipped to Colombia! Perhaps by Christmas, approval would be given…
Meanwhile, Joe and Magnus went off to cook up some trouble somewhere, but not before Magnus said hi to Puck and talked to Joe about creating some sort of car juiced up to look like a stagecoach with lanterns on the sides.
Before leaving, there was dinner and a row of goblets filled with rainbow Jell-O lined up on the counter.
Then OLeif spotted the keys way up in the branches. He and Francis took turns lobbing old potato gun launchers skyward to try to bring them down. No good.
As they left, Mom and Puck blew kisses to, and caught them from one another. And Rose squished the cats.