Home Sweet St. Louis
Saturday night we had fallen asleep to the tune of Carrie and Rose arguing:
“If you pull the sheets off me in the night, I’ll punch you in the face.” (Giggle.)
“Well, then I’ll just have to kill you.”
(Giggle.)
“Then I’ll come back as a ghost.”
“Then I’ll whack you on the head with a tombstone.”
(Giggles.)
Sunday morning, Carrie’s “fat cat run” alarm woke us up, and with the lamps still off, a few baseball videos and photos were reviewed from the week:
“You should hear the one I recorded of Mike McDreamy when he walked into the dugout,” Carrie said. “You can hear Rose in the background saying, ‘He looks like Robert Redford.’ In a Spongebob voice.”
Rose claimed that she hadn’t meant to say Robert Redford. But I didn’t hear the rest of the protest because, even though it was only six AM, we were packing to leave.
An easy five hours of road later, the silver shine of our greatest landmark waved us on in, past the stadium, to home territory.
I heard a squeal from Puck inside the Big House as Rose walked through the door first, and then Puck thrust a wrapped box into my hands:
“OPEN IT! IT’S FOR YOU!”
I gave him a big squeeze and pulled off the shiny green paper. A baseball coin bank. He received more hugs and kisses.
Francis was already snoozing on the loveseat before departing for an in-service at work. Rose left right away to retrieve her solitary apartment key from Thunderbird and Annamaria, missing her Stinkerbelle. Carrie greeted her buns:
“What happened in here? This place is a mess!”
What can you expect from kids? Maybe that’s what surprised me when Puck decided, halfway through the afternoon, to clean Francis’ room. He lugged up a sack of trash from the basement:
“Uncle Francis is a messy guy.”
He followed this up by folding all of his laundry on the couch downstairs:
“Papa taught me how to fold shirts like the B Scouts.”
Cleaning supplies, broom and dust pan, and then the kitchen trash, until he was satisfied with the results, asking me to finish things up with the vacuum while he sat on Francis’ bed and watched with headphones over his ears.
A couple of hours later, we split off for home. The baseball bank went on my dresser. Crackers was dancing around to see us, alone for most of the week. While Puck nuzzled her, he finished off the day with a joke:
“I have an emergency question for you. Why did the chicken cross the road? TO GET TO THE OTHER SIDE!”