Eighth Round

I walked into Puck’s room that morning and noticed the mess:

“Puck, you need to clean your room on Tuesday before you play with Anna and Eddie.”

“Why do I have to clean it before I play with them, Mom?”

“Because, since the beginning of time, kids have had to clean their rooms before they can play with their friends.”

“But, Mom. At the beginning of time there was only Adam and Eve.”

Mom’s gifts: flowers from Rose, and a candle in Savannah Moss. Flowers from Joe. A book on English villages from our little family. And a leather-bound Spurgeon’s morning/evening devotions from the rest of the family, plus blue “clackers.” A remnant of the 60s. Almost everyone took a turn trying to get the toy operating. Clearly a lost art. Francis managed to “clack” them a few times, and grinned:

“Science!”

At one point in the afternoon, I heard Mom talking to the gang in the other room:

“I asked Irish the other day, ‘So, Irish, when you hear your conscience speaking to you, what kind of a voice does it have?’ And she said, ‘Vincent Price!’”

“Sometimes Bing Crosby,” Irish added.

Only in my family…

We ended up sprawled around the porch as the afternoon crawled along, acclimatizing Suda/Mrs. Gigglesworth to Snuggles. Other than some disinterested hissing, they didn’t seem to care too much.

“You know what Joe did before he gave me his old room?” Francis asked. “He bagged up all his old used underwear and gave it to me as a going away present.”

Typical.

That evening, after another day of sunshine, wind, exercise, and pollen, Puck fell asleep to tunes of old-style 1950’s Caribbean/South America.