Cheese & Crackers
Collette had caught Linnea’s irritating sore throat cold.
“Mommy’s in quarantine,” OLeif told the bouncing Puck as they waved hello from the bedroom door early that morning.
Collette wondered how it was that OLeif never got sick (except, of course, after eating a tub of ice cream that was three months expired). He decided to stay home and watch the Puck while Collette worked on recovering.
In the middle of the morning, the snow began to fall, light and fluffy.
Later, Rose got on VideoChat to talk about nothing much in particular.
“Maybe my class will be canceled tonight because of the snow,” she grinned.
Carrie waved “hello” with her toes from the background.
“Here, I’ll put it in its natural habitat,” Rose said about Carrie’s foot, changing the backdrop. “Mars!”
Collette could hear the fuzz of the television where the kids were watching “The Time Machine”. Another classic from the growing-up years in Dad’s video collection. Also included would be “Journey to the Center of the Earth”.
OLeif was coming and going back and forth between work and home. While Puck happily wheeled around in his walker, eating banana puffs that afternoon, OLeif pulled up the driveway again in the ever-falling snow. Puck had learned how to toss things off his tray. Off went the Cheerio. Crunch! went the wheel over the Cheerio.
“Hey!” Collette exclaimed. “You did that on purpose!”
“So,” said OLeif, “the guy who plays Charlie in LOST and the girl who plays Kate are getting married later this summer.”
“What?”
“Yeah, Simon told me that at work. And I said, ‘No way. My wife would have told me if that was true’. Then I owed him a soda later, because he was right.”
And with this bit of trivia came the good news that the new season of LOST was, indeed, beginning that night. To celebrate the watching, OLeif went out to find dinner and a key lime pie for desert. He returned in the thickness of the snow with boxes of water crackers, soft cheeses, a summer sausage, black cherry spritzers, and the pie.
“This is old school OLeif and Collette,” OLeif said. “We had this meal a lot back then.”
By the time the evening had ended, Collette was pretty displeased that Charlie had died, and considered never watching LOST again. And the coffee table was covered with wrappers and glass bottles.