Creek walk

Crunch out a stack of work in the morning... splashed in sun...

Oxbear leaves for the DMV after lunch... but somehow his 12:30 scheduled appointment isn't amongst their records... returns with a stack of papers to try another day...

After lunch Yali emerges from the outdoors in a garble of muffled yells through his handmade cardboard robot bunny costume... Patience's fuchsia velvet hairbow tacked to his neck as a bow tie... as he expires in a mechanical sigh of dramatic play-death across the living room floor...

Then the split into the afternoon...

...Oxbear for R.C.'s Wash-U graduation ceremony... the Algerian would-be surgeon progressing through the American educational system towards his goal...

Myself and the kids west to O'Fallon where we drop Puck at the kinetic park with J and buddies...

Then an hour and thirty-nine minutes of obscene traffic into Jefferson County to meet Sally, Linnea-Irish, and little A for a creek walk...

We hunt for the teeth of prehistoric monsters and the arrow tips of lost civilizations... but after an hour searching in the cold waters... the best I can find is some chunks of heavy brick-red jasper and a rock that resembles half a fossilized avocado...

Yali and Patience splash with little A in the slow-moving current... Little A sticks her head in the water to blow bubbles... while Yali skips rocks and soaks himself up to his chin in a cooling pre-dusk... I drive us back holding irreversibly muddy boots out the open window towards Sally's farmhouse...

Oxbear rolls up twenty minutes later blasting ragtime from the minivan to grab the kids... “Can we get Panda Express?” Patience begs eagerly... she's been asking for awhile now...

It's a three-sister crew for movie night... Linnea back after returning little A for a shower... white-gold light cracking green woods as we discuss things like the Bulgarian Orthodox church and current events in immigration... waiting for a delivery of cheeseburgers in encroaching night...