Ingrain

“It’s a plant, Mom.”

“What’s that?”

I looked back at the pair of serious eyes staring at me across the table and the empty cup Puck held up to me.

“There’s a plant,” he repeated. “In here.”

I looked inside. A stray fleck of golden apple, or “the mother”, as I believe they call it.

“That’s just part of the apple from your cider, Puck,” I explained.

“It’s a plant, Mom,” he insisted solemnly. “And it needs apple cider to live. Please don’t throw it away.”

This. Is Puck.

Teaching is sometimes like trying to run away from the bad guy in an ocean of cold molasses with your feet shackled together, blind-folded. Puck on the receiving end, while not agreeing to this exact extent I believe, will still laugh at himself for making mistakes…

“Oh! Why do I have that in my brain hands?”

…was his signature reaction of the morning.

Francis required algebraic assistance at two.

This inevitably means a nap.

Well, he tries to anyway. It probably didn’t help that Puck decided to fix his hair with a broken hairbrush he dug up in the recesses of the bathroom cabinet.

“You’ll have to tell your family when they see this cool hair-do, Francis,” Puck told him with all the seriousness of a man intent on his craft. “They will freak out.”

Hmmm…

Francis departed with a scalp the shade of raw pork.