March 26

OLeif couldn’t always be trusted on his visits to the store. Whenever Collette sent him to get the usual necessities (meaning mostly baby goods), he returned with extra items, not on the official list. Tuesday night he had come back with a gallon of Archer Farms chocolate peanut butter ice cream and a miniature airfoil kite in a zippered pouch.
“Kite?” Collette asked.
“That’s so I can be cool with the kids,” he said, with the usual OLeif smile.
“Ice cream?”
“That’s so I can be cool with you.”
The next morning, Collette realized that she had stepped on a tiny fragment of the mirror that Puck had broken the previous afternoon. She couldn’t get it out of the sole of her foot, and it stayed there all day.
“He gets seven years for that,” Carrie teased him at the breakfast table the next morning. “Or maybe seven months in baby time.”
“If you break a mirror that’s already broken, you reverse your bad luck,” said Rose. “I broke a broken mirror at work once.”
Puck didn’t know anything of luck and sat in his high chair eating chubby strawberry pieces while everyone else had biscuits and crunchy bacon.
“He wants some bacon. Give him some bacon,” said Rose.
Collette decided that giving Puck bacon wouldn’t be a very good idea. He wasn’t offered any.
Wednesday was nice. Collette, Carrie-Bri, Linnea, and Puck took a walk in the neighborhood. The trees were beginning to bud. The tulips and grape hyacinth that Mom and Collette had planted in the fall were sprouting.
After homework, Joe left for the Zoo with Wally and Lolli.
Puck sat in his high chair for his afternoon snack and talked to Rose’s back massager.
“That’s not how you do it,” Rose told him.
She rubbed his back with it.
“You don’t even like it when people give you back massages,” said Frances. “Like that guy in Egypt. You’d just tell them to go away.”
“No I wouldn’t. I’d say, ‘Why thank you, kind sir.’”
Carrie-Bri was researching volunteer work abroad.
“I could live in Namibia for six months, but it’s rehabilitating elephants. And because I see them as being a useful commodity, I don’t think they’d want me.”
Nepal was out.
“I can’t see living in a tent in Nepal for six months.”
Asian desert was different from African desert, and Carrie preferred African.
After the morning had begun with a clear sunrise, sometime in the early afternoon, the skies became gray. Thunder had returned again.