First Farewell
Sunday, June 24, 2012
The finale – last official-unofficial Sunday with the Rye family before disembarking for Ethiopia.
It didn’t actually turn out to be a bawl-fest after all. Probably helped that they were still in town for another eighteen days to pack their life’s belongings into twelve Tupperware boxes. And that everyone knew they were coming back in two years.
Two years…
A blink.
Not to detract from the somber element of the morning.
Platters of cheese and cold cuts, dollar sandwiches, small bowls with ladles for honey and mustard, hand-frosted cupcakes, and iced punch. Everything arranged over tiers covered in McCrae cloths of green peacock and African stripes. The reception ran on past 11:30 into the heat of a day reaching 99.
Oh lordy.
Were they really prophesying 104 for Friday!
Tempers were uneven, back on the ranch…
“Those pants look painted on you!” Linnea goggled Rose’s new lavender clam diggers.
“They do not!”
“That’s what you said about mine!”
“I’m done with that place,” Carrie declared, tossing her hand.
Apparently Saturday evening following services hadn’t gone so well…
“That’s just because one person invited you to a Princess Bride party…” Rose smirked.
“No. It was more than one.”
“It was not. They were all inviting you to the same party.”
“Nerds.”
Puck offered dividends…
“Honey. I have to pinch your cheeks. Or else,” Carrie warned him.
“Ok. Just pinch my cheeks.”
“Rose, where’s the paddle for your ice cream maker?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t need one.”
The feminine trio marched off to the grocery store for supplies while Mom and Dad napped and Francis trotted out to two point five hours of lifeguarding.
Ten minutes later, the girls returned.
“That was fast.”
“Snicketts girls don’t mess around,” Carrie replied.
Rose unloaded a monster bag of Arctic ice on the counter, after trying to convince Linnea that it had been “chopped off an iceberg”.
“Want to hug a birthday bunny?” Carrie asked, slipping back into the kitchen with a roll of fluff…
“Happy birthday, stinkbomb,” Rose grumbled.
“It’s not his birthday!”
“How do you know?”
Carrie returned the bunny.
“Look at the creepy penguin,” Rose said next, launching the ice bag onto the table by Collette. “See his face?”
His eyes did look a little crossed.
Rose then commenced to convince Collette to take the kitten for Puck, and poured herself a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
It was two o’clock.
The girls continued to discuss church and church people…
“She has a smile like a ‘V’,” was all Collette really caught of that conversation from Rose’s end.
And…
“Look at my blood.”
Which was entirely unrelated.
“Benedict might take Floozie,” Rose added to Mom later, just as Carrie took a whack at Rose’s dairy-air.
While she discussed 5,000 year-old Indian medicine with Collette, Carrie arrayed her feast.
Strawberry pretzel salad. Scrambled eggs with cheese…
Eggs?
“You want strawberry pretzel salad and eggs for your birthday dinner?”
Throw in some pancakes and bacon and homemade vanilla ice cream, and you got one weird Rose special.
“You want the pancakes fat and gooey, right, Rose?” Carrie asked from behind the buttered griddle.
“Yup.”
“Gooey pancakes?” OLeif groaned later. “You can’t have gooey pancakes. It’s like knowing the secret to a magic trick… It’s like seeing the zipper on a mascot’s uniform. You just can’t do that.”
But they did.
Meanwhile, Collette painstaked through the second sister who had decided to incorporate dreadlocks, although this time it wasn’t because she lost her hairbrush in the Australian rainforest. Linnea unfolded a wad of cardinal red embroidery floss, followed by turquoise and gold thread, and a moonstone bead, despite Carrie’s warnings of tears, headaches, and general apocalyptic destruction.
To no avail.
Linnea knew what she wanted.
Puck came running through the house with two mud-caked hands, leaping over Collette’s Macbook where Linnea built stone cities in the wilderness. Rose recited an original poem as Puck bounded again, missing the screen my nanoseconds before Collette remedied the situation…
“Jack be nimble, jack be quick, jack jump over the Mac… Oh, dang it.”
Mom and Dad duet-ed on a little Michael Jackson. Carrie kicked in some of his “ABC’s” learned from an old cassette tape…
“Got that from a junk store or something.”
And Dad found an unusual knife in Linnea’s bead box…
“Where did you get this?”
“I found it on the street.”
Dad was not pleased…
“This is the kind of knife they use to kill people. Put this away before someone kills themselves.”
After a tiny chicken candle was lit and snuffed out, Rose was served the ice cream. No cake, Carrie explained, because, “Rose just picks at it.”
And a bag of paper-wrapped packages. Linnea’s gift came in the form of tea towels with Mark Twain quotes printed on them, including:
“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
A one-hour massage from the three Silverspoon’s and Carrie. And a silver necklace from Joe…
“It was made in Italy,” Carrie said.
“Yeah,” Puck added. “I helped pick that out at Wal-Mart.”
No way, punk.
[It was Target.]
Swedish firesteel.
“Oh yeah,” Rose cackled. “I can light 2,000 fires with this.”
Nude heels, Coach perfume, and a white clutch finished the presentation. Rose unboxed the perfume and yanked the pink bow off the top.
“I’ll put this on Bon-Bon’s ear,” Carrie said, plucking it off the table.