January 19th, 2025
After breakfast burritos... to church in a negative two windchill...
Rev. K in India... sitting in the pew waiting for the service to begin as a cello plays Bach's Suite No. 1 in G Major from the balcony... Patience putting on endless layers of lipgloss... Oxbear and Yali (pen squiggles inexplicably sketched across his Sunday pants) folding origami stars...
Walk the kids across the parking lot to Sunday School in a stupid-cold wind, then join Oxbear for Bible study on the Book of Philemon...
Yali, “hopped up” on Snickers bars from Sunday School, is feeling good at home in the late morning... incites the need to drop-kick his sister's purse across the living room, laughing, “Come and fight me, Pesto!”... Patience giggles...
Oxbear and I “nip out” to Menard's early afternoon while the kids hang at home together... Oxbear needs to find a few 60mm flat head socket screws... it's sort of nostalgic perusing the aisle of bolts and washers, which was always fun as a kid... liked to imagine each one was a portal to another world... bins and bins and bins of portals... pick up a movie candy box of Bottle Caps on the way out (more nostalgia)
Puck is home cuddling with his cat before another four-hour shift in Produce
Oxbear and Yali join B and Ju in Chesterfield for Slick City and Hi-Pointe cheeseburgers
Patience and I drive out to the Big House (ragtime on the radio) where almost all of the remaining family is cloistered against the cold... Patience gets busy with tiny cousins employed in potato soup, brightly colored clay, dot art stamps, and hot cocoa topped with “Amish marshmallows”... while the adults discuss things like potential mice nests in the basement and thirty year-olds smoking cigars, with a little conversational garnish of Elmer balancing a tub on his head singing a selection from “The Jungle Book”... “I will go to fetch the water”... with amended lyrics about “fritters” and other non-jungly things...
Windchill at four below by dinnertime back home... Penn Station bundled in one of the warmer rooms of the house...
Puck tucks down his sandwich before driving back out to O'Fallon to hang out with J...
The rest of the evening is for bundling into warm layers and tunic sweater wraps and leg warmers and double socks and sock slippers as a starry starry night folds in the cold...