If I Lived in 1862

“Should I tell all of my friends that God is my great great great great uncle?”

Leave it to a kid to get to the bottom point.

“Well…”

It’s Kindergarten logic true, even if it sounds terrible. After all, when Jesus is, indeed, your blood great-great-great etc. half uncle… What’s a Kindergartener supposed to think?

“And they would look at me and say, ‘You’re joking, right?’ And then I would just walk away and they would say, ‘Oh, he was serious!’”

While I was digging around in the laundry, Crackers was busy in a corner of the cool basement. I clawed out a clump of wet clothes while she batted at some inanimate life form on the cement. I tossed lumps of soaked shirts into the dryer, and she began eating the immobile life form. I de-fuzzed the lint catcher, she choked down beetle legs. As mundane as days of shining up our old Firefly can often be… I realize more and more about how incredible even the life of someone who “just moms” is now. More so than any other people in history. That organ concert from Friday night – for a girl my age one hundred fifty years ago, say, that would have topped everything for an entire lifetime. Just to enter the Basilica at all. Just to have witnessed music performed live in a cathedral worthy of Europe’s most ornate ornaments.

This is not a boring life.

If even our shampoos are packed with milk and honey… how bad can anything really be here?

[Materially speaking, of course.]

Puck broke the trash can before lunch. Probably because Crackers was sitting on the lid while he tried to use the foot press. Sometimes… I just really don’t know. How are these things possible?

“I’m trying to fill this house up with words, Mom. Cotton, cotton, cotton, co’on, co’on, co’on, con, con, con… Is it working?”

“No…”

“Why? Do they go through the wall to the outside?”

“They can. They go to wherever someone can hear them.”

He downed two bananas before I could even look up. Then begged the pomegranate that The Bear had carted in early this morning. I sliced it in half with that particular crunch. Puck hovered next to me on the counter, waiting for his glass bowl of tiny crimson glass.

We hit the neighborhood fast before dark. Puck walks so much better than even six months ago. He can keep up with me and still be highly entertained. Especially if a white cat is part of the equation.

“She likes me, Mom!”

Tonight, Puck tried to convince me to let him have a pet snake.

Absolutely never.

“It’s ok, Mom,” he grinned in rosy cheeks. “It would be very harmless.”

Totally.

“He might kill me in the night. So I’d better put him in a glass jar.”

“I guess that would be a good idea…”

“Why, Mama?

“It could get into trouble.”

“What trouble?”

“It could eat things.”

“What things? Eat up a whole bottle of soda? That is so crazy.”

Puck forgot about the snake minutes later when he thought a bird might be a better idea, and less dangerous to Crackers. Even if he didn’t consider the flipside. Instead, he wedged himself under a freshly washed eggplant blanket praying…

“Please help Francis to get over his sickness. I really know how bad it feels to be sick. And please let him win his test.”

The Bear brought back some laughs en Español to join the fun and fajitas of a cold night while we discussed the problematic issues surrounding a Rob Bell book.

So how come I got the huge privilege to live this life…