Before the Fall
“I can’t go back to sleep.”
The red digital numbers on El Oso’s alarm clock read 6:20. I had slept heavy. In fact, I wondered if I had moved all night. I turned my head back to the voice. Puck was standing by my pillow.
“Just try, bud.”
I must have fallen asleep again at some point. Oso, who had a seven o’clock breakfast appointment with Ethiopia, put another pillow over my eyes and left.
“Mom, I know Dad told me not to wake you up yet, but I made breakfast for you.”
7:13. I could handle that. Puck floated in with a tray covered in flour sack towel, spread with pop tarts (toasted), apple, orange, steak knife, buttered toast (with a note reading “Puck” beside it, just so I wouldn’t confuse which foods were his), Saltines, vitamins, and glasses of water and apple juice. And “I Love Lucy”. Breakfast in bed. Puck giggling with his head propped on my shoulder to the antics of six-months preggo Lucy Ricardo. That’s nice.
Joe called me, asking for help with his passport application. He also let me know that he got a box of Twinkies from his co-worker that morning. Perks of being one of the only kids showed up to work for the holiday week.
Then Francis called, wanting assistant with spring semester class schedule.
It was cold enough for snow to still blanket all the lawns. Weather forecasters were predicting anywhere up to sixteen fresh inches by Sunday morning. This usually seems to happen on the weekends: blizzards and ice storms. Also, a whopping -2 degrees for the high on Monday.
Oso and Puck enjoyed their own guys’ night while I shipped off to pick up Carrie-Bri. Movie Night was at Rose’s where Stinkerbelle sat grumpily under the Christmas tree, Carrie-Bri brought homemade key lime pie and played Forza, and Rose fixed Jaya’s laptop, cradling the fat cat in her arms and telling us about a ladybug the cranky feline had eaten the other day. Annamaria and her husband of six, not quite seven, months joined us an hour later. Thunderbird purchased two bundles of firewood, which Rose cooked into a decent fire. Flipped “Moone Boy” on Hulu. Some sibling-like banter between Rose and Thunderbird, of course…
“I’d say you were ugly then!”
“And I’d say you must have just looked in a mirror!”
“But I taped a picture of your face on the mirror!”
“Then Annamaria would be mad at you for taping my face on the mirror!”
And so on.
Carrie and I cashed in just after ten, while the kids continued their party of fires, Hebrew Nationals, and an Amazon box stuffed with Irish’s Hallowe’en candy.