From Basement to Attic
Crackers pounced on my head this morning to wake me up. Twice. Just like a tiger. I guess it’s her version of the Serengeti prowl.
Figures it would be the morning I was kind of cranky about the house being old and rusty and cracked and grungy. I get this idea of a pile of bricks and sticks stapled together with rolls of packing tape. Granted, it’s not a shack. Things work. It’s mostly organized, clean. It’s just not exactly one of those cookie cutters built in 2005 where the garage juts out further than the front porch. And you have to weed the mulch every other Saturday or the neighbors will complain. Not that that’s what I’m going for, either… So on this auspicious of mornings, it would naturally happen that the main drain backed up in the basement. Again. I called The Bear on my chipped-edged phone which now sported a fancy rich red pearlized rubberized hard case for $2.65. [Sometimes it pays to have an old-fashioned phone.] He would pick up the Drain-O. Puck tacked in some of his conversation on the topic with his dad…
“Dad. Can you come home as soon as possible. And take care of this flood. It’s about one foot out. And it’s very serious. So can you please come home soon.”
Questions are always statements with Puck… Still, I could only hope for another false alarm. What can you do… I was also beginning to think that maybe a squirrel had died in the attic instead. Right above Puck’s room… See, this is the stuff I’m talking about.
Time waits for no mom. I finally sat down with Puck to his reading lesson at 10:30. When the day already feels half-gone, there’s nothing else you can really do but catch up and watch soapy suds dry on cold cement, which did, two hours later, happen.
Puck was almost finished with his tuna. What slowed him down was his knuckles. He pinched the skin there with two fingers.
“Look, Mom. My fingers are all old.”
“They’re not that old…”
“Look at all thaaaat. Look at all that bumpy skin.”
The best I could boast for today was a load of laundry, a scheduled adoption home visit in January, and keeping Puck out of the M’nM bat. Well. It’s always more than that, I guess. But you try and you try. So we read about 19th century Spanish-Haitian-American pirates before I put together a sausage and egg casserole for dinner over Medieval selections from Mannheim Steamroller in a colder-than-freezing gray Monday afternoon in December. Puck was taking forever again in his writing lesson… Roll a 2-dimensional Calvin, Hobbes, and a Pete Hollister into one, and you sort of get the idea. The neighbor dogs barked somewhere in the soup of a dimming late afternoon.
“I wish I was as free as the dogs,” Puck sighed, laboring over the word ‘bunnies’.
As a dark evening arrived, I was doing good to retrieve the casserole before it burned, confirm dinner plans from The Bear with Sunrise for the following week, and prepare a small clothing order before the gift card expired. Take it or leave it, but the Snicketts girls seem to fund a particular place of business with regular floods of profit without leaving the house. Within reason.
I tried to pack in the last stack of books with Puck before seven o’clock. Just in time to read in Missouri Conservationist about how lambs quarter seeds will still grow after being buried 1,600 years underground. While Crackers stayed curled in a plump ring on the upper floor of her cat condo. She has yet to visit the ground level. On purpose.
The Bear returned victorious with the Drain-O. Our hero. So I saved him the last of those chocolate peanut butter cups.