Don't bother me about that now, man! It's the play-offs!

“Do you want to grab a banana before we go, Puck?”

“That would be pleasant.”

It was not quite seven, and we were hitting pavement again in time for The Bear to make mid-terms.

It is gorgeous now. The beauty of an autumn earth. It’s almost like a train set – although I’m not completely certain I like the analogy – a sky view of an earlier time. Unending carpet of golds, reds, oranges, yellows, and tapering greens, folded into each other like a cake batter, mixed in with the soil and acorn under-earth, stitched into buttery hay fields and bundles of whispery white flowers and skies that change color just for the occasion. Naturally, on a day like this in orange pumpkin glow and the skies you see behind shadow castles in storybooks… This is the life. We even roped in a 5% chance of tornados today. [Provided nothing interfered from around three to six.]

Francis creaked through the front door with a sack of egg mcmuffin and orange juice after the early 4:45 shift at work. Now that he swam for the Sea Dragons, he was more pillaging ravenous than ever. Puck was deeply engrossed in building up “crazy town” Legos ghost towns on the leather couch while Carrie turned on a Hallowe’en tunes montage. The boys were arguing about things. Something about moldy dishes and fruit flies in the basement…

Accusation.

Accusation.

Accusation.

“Blasphemy, Joe!”

[Yes, my brother literally says that.]

Linnea was stamped and shipped out for three days of Nationals this afternoon. Someplace in Springfield. Mom would join her on Thursday.

The church library was finally, finally, papered up and down and done. Sunday was opening hour, and my job was done. Mostly. Mom added her own flair of autumn florals and scare-a-crows. And even I had to admit that it now looked like a church library.

When we returned, cleaning supplies, boxes of Ziplocs, and machinery lay stacked and strewn all over the kitchen counters and floor. Francis had removed the garbage disposal.

Yes, I played hooky from the World Religions class at church tonight. Although I can’t count it as an official “hooky”, as I haven’t actually been able to attend yet. There was absolutely no way I was going to sit through 90 minutes of Taoism lectures – as fascinating as that is – with all that nervous excitement bubbling up like witch’s brew. No way in St. Louis. This had to be done.

For that matter, I ended up not sending Puck to church either. But for other reasons. As any good Snicketts member will do, we were all scouting the weather throughout the afternoon as the game got rigged up. Nothing much. Just a usual innocent band of orange and yellow racing in from the west. But in that electric yellow and green blend of organicals outside the windows, the sirens whirred up again in their apocolyptic drone. Down we went. Laptops, Legos, lugging the lops. Two boxes of bunnies waited anxiously as we congregated, clipping shut windows, shutting off kitchen appliances, and retreating.

But, also as usual, nothing ever happened.

Dad, who had been on the road, joined us for dinner that had survived the emergency, and we sat around the game with plates of large shell macaroni in homemade cheese sauce, until the game was also rain-delayed. Losing Carlos in the first was a significant beast. But in true Cards fashion, his replacement – black-bearded 1890’s Russian village vest and newsboy cap Matt Carpenter – bombed a two-run shot in his first at-bat.

There is something absolutely heaven-yellow about the picture-box outside the window when the sun shines at the tops of the rain-trees, glowing torches across the old field a mile away. As long as I can remember, it looks like this after rain when the sun just comes back.

The Bear handed me a fat shortbread cookie iced like a baseball, scrawled “Cardinals!” between the seams. He gets me. And we drove home to wait out the rain delay.