June 22

During 7:45 nursing duty that morning, Collette was happy to see the dark clouds in the west finally break forth in rain over the church.
At the house, it was a usual Sunday lunch. After brisket and small potatoes in cream sauce, Mom brought out the spice cake with caramel frosting.
“You squish my cake, and I squish you!” Rose was saying to Joe.
Joe laughed.
“You’d better stop it,” Rose warned.
“Rose,” Mom scolded her.
“But, Mom! He put rocks in my cup!”
The kids had been discussing the best ways to appear at their future funerals.
“Juliet and I decided that when we’re old and we die, we’ll be so ugly that we won’t care what we look like anyway,” said Rose.
“So right before rigamortis sets in, we’ll have someone pose our arms so they’re all like ‘Rawr!’ And when they say, ‘Kids, go say goodbye to Grandma’, they’ll be like, ‘Ahhhhh!’”
After Joe mentioned something about turning himself into a pinwheel, Carrie suggested that he pin himself to a butterfly board with all the other butterflies.
“Alright,” said Dad. “That’s enough.”
But there was still more giggling before the subject turned to sand bagging.
“They expect it to peak this week,” said Joe.
“I guess we should sand bag,” said Rose.
“What’s the point?” said Carrie. “It never works anyway. When has it ever worked?”
“They built Hoover Dam out of sandbags,” said Frances.
While they began to clean up the kitchen, Carrie called Dad to the window of the patio door.
“Dad, I don’t think that Frances should be throwing bottle rockets with the neighbors outside.”
Frances was cleared from the lawn.