Ch. 160; Vol. 10

Heavy snow. In June…

“Last time it snowed in June here… 1968,” someone told me.

I woke up with an ill foreboding.

“Oh, Puck…”

“I’M SORRY, MOM!” he whispered as loudly as possible to me over the new pastor’s sermon.

Blue ink pen.

On my sun dress.

“It’s not the end of the world,” he noted casually, as he returned to his scribblings.

No, no it’s not. But he could have at least aimed for the blue stripes instead of the white.

The kid who has to patrol the entire building before church…

“I’m doing my rehearsal,” he told me, before he tried to grab a make-your-own cup of hot cocoa at the coffee table.

My love for showers continued.

And by showers, of course, I mean to say rain showers. That’s what we got, too. A Noah’s deluge. A soaker. Sitting alone after Sunday School in the church foyer with the chandeliers and myself, listening to the rain wash the fields. Pounding the green roof. Before the boys had left me with tables and chairs, the dark line of it raced in over the fields.

But there was another shower, too.

The cupcakes and pink and silver tissue paper kind. Except more yellow, for Annamaria. A lot of yellow. Like corn salsa, lemon drops, yellow pepper and sausage kabobs yellow. And red velvet cupcakes. Which I took, of course.

It gets loud with 45+ women in one room, by the way, even if the ceiling’s twenty feet up or more. You see familiar faces. Like from old-old days when you were three years old in the Baptist nursery. Speaking of which…

“Hey, Puck,” Diana called him, after everything was over.

Puck approached the group of girls in yellow, squinting in the sun.

“Did you know that I used to chew on your mom’s head when we were babies?”

Puck didn’t know how to respond to that…

“What?”

“How long ago do you think that was?” I asked him.

He shrugged…

“I don’t know. A hundred years?”

Then it was the decades-long tradition of waiting for “the moms” to finish talking so we could leave…

“Some things never change,” said Diana.

“We’re coming, we’re coming,” they protested.

“Half an hour later…” Eleda grinned.

[*Photo by The Bear.]