Blow, Wind
Windows open. Monthly tornado siren test. December 3rd… I knew at least Carrie was happy with the initial progress of the white Christmas projections.
“Dad! Dad!”
– Wumpf. A five year-old still in his pajamas came hurling himself onto The Bear’s back. –
“Dad! Could you make me two toasts. And cut them into triangles?”
– The days just never began soon enough for our young chap. –
“Mom! Mom! Come see my invention in the kitchen!”
– Then he grinned almost a hair on the side of maniacal. –
“It shoots hot sauth [sauce]!”
By the time we finally got the morning established, and I had inspected Puck’s catapult contraption [which probably would have, indeed, shot hot-sauce, if we had any], Puck noted the package of new yellow rubber gloves on the kitchen counter. He just couldn’t help himself…
“Mom! I want to help you wash the dishes!”
He dragged over one of the antique embroidered cushioned kitchen table chairs to the sink and rinsed all the dishes. We were a dynamic yellow rubber gloved duo.
After getting my first taste of curtain hanging on Saturday, I tried my own hand at the project in Puck’s room before I had even started the laundry. I must confess success. Puck had two new New Mexican turquoise panels hanging from a silver rod above the window before his reading lessons commenced.
Time has its own furious clip. Ten-thirty, and time to break for a snack. While I dipped wet laundry into the clothes dryer, Puck pulled the everlasting Jelly Belly bag from the bowl cabinet.
“Only five!” I called back up the stairs.
“I got twelve though!”
“Pick out five,” I told him, hauling a basket back up the stairs.
He began counting again.
“There’s no five in here, Mom. There’s just twelve.”
Math.
Even without the rain and storms and chaos that I would prefer, the weather was gorgeous. I prepped The Bear’s special made ham and potato soup while Puck plunked his ukulele in the backyard, donned in new t-shirt. High winds. And Fed Ex deposited the bed frame on the porch. I paused for my own brief lunch of hard boiled egg and canned pumpkin.
We have it easy, don’t we… Something like my 28th-great grandfather was walled alive in a castle with his mother in the 1000’s until he starved to death by a wicked king. His son died at the same age by falling off a horse because his foot was caught in the stirrup. Sometimes this genealogy stuff pays off. In a morbid, terribly horrible way. R.I.P. great-great-great-etc.-grandpas…
Puck shuffled through the Monday ads from the mail. He rifled out a Post Dispatch store leaflet…
“Look, Mom! Your greatest weakness!”
He almost plastered the image of the new St. Louis jersey in my face. A minute later, another find. He pushed a fleur-de-lis symbol an inch in front of my eyeballs…
“Look! Grandma Combs’ greatest weakness, too!”
Leave it to Puck to recognize a fleur-des-lis without assistance. Schnucks was next…
“Is this 18th century cheese?…”
Sun fanned through the early evening clouds as we took our three-thirty walk in the high wind. Two young high school boys played basketball in the street. One of them in a knit hat and eyebrow ring grinned…
“I like your Doctor Who shirt.”
I guess it’s expanding more than I thought out here.
The Bear chatted with a family from South Africa in our garage this evening. Apparently there wasn’t a need to cut up the queen mattress into blocks for the garbage after all. [Although I thought that would have been sort of fun…] Instead, it would be taken for a month to benefit their relatives, visiting stateside.
Thought of the Day
I know the idea is sort of overused and antiquated, but sometimes it’s actually pretty interesting to think of life as a similarity to Pilgrim’s Progress. Maybe something a little less brown and white, though. I think it comes to mind particularly when I listen to those Medieval and Renaissance orchestral arrangements that seem to annoy everyone but me and maybe Puck. One can almost picture walking along to the music, emitting from some unknown place in the day, through green valleys, like velvet, charcoal-gray canyons, all mixed together, with the sea someplace in the east… [the sea should be in the east, not the west]. And by lamp at night when you can only hear the wind and ocean. Sometimes you find little things by the path. Artifacts from former travelers. Tiny pieces of creation – colored rocks, flowers, shells… I guess it’s sort of a reinvented Pilgrim’s Progress. A little different take, but a similar sort of journey. Too bad the word “journey” is so over-used. It’s a good word.