Et toz dis a jointes mains li cri merci,
Friday, October 20, 2006
Rose joined Collette in the office that morning to aid in paperwork and such.
Seeing that the heat was still out, Rose started closing all the doors to the offices and the basement until a more acceptable warmth filled the office area. She also dragged out another space heater from Jimmy’s office and turned on the tunes of Bing Crosby and Burl Ives to liven the dull sunshine-filled hours of the day.
Rose did, however, conveniently forget her lunch, perhaps in the hopes of Mom dropping off something more tasty than what the typical kitchen fare could provide. But Mom had little sympathy for her plight and told her that she would bring a sandwich for her at four.
Later, while Collette ate her own lunch, Rose copied any papers that were meant to be copied on colored paper for the day. She didn’t have much interest in bland white copies, but she did make a colorful array of blues, green, orange, and purple sheets for various projects during the course of the morning and afternoon.
She also substituted three blow-pops for lunch. Collette remembered the days when she enjoyed a blow-pop herself. Those were the days when the only kind of ice cream she and Carrie ever ordered was bubblegum – pink ice cream filled with brightly colored bubblegum balls. That was living the lap of luxury.
Meanwhile there was a good deal of giggling later from the conference room where Rose and Georgia Owen folded bulletins.
“Mrs. Owen is one of my best friends now,” Rose said happily on the way back.
Before their three hours of bulletin folding were finished, they had schemed up a plan to save the trees and the volunteer hours by eliminating all flyers from the bulletin. Rose drew up their committee statement on the white board in the conference room – something to the effect of:
“Meet our demands by saving the trees and keeping your volunteers. And give us cookies and hot chocolate.”
Collette wondered what the session would think of it at their Monday night meeting.
“Don’t tell them I wrote it,” Rose called to Collette from the other room.
“Don’t tell them I did either,” Georgia added, laughing.
Before long, Mom had arrived at the end of Collette’s work day where the Pies dropped off Frances and Linnea to meet Mom. They had spent the day with the Pies and seemed to have enjoyed themselves.
Meanwhile, OLeif was not feeling well, despite his entire gallon of orange juice and bottle of vitamin C.
However, he was feeling well enough later that evening to stop by and pick up quick-made southwestern food from Moe’s down the road. And there was a Friday night movie back home.