May 12

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Over at the house…

When Puck arrived wearing his sunnies with the shades punched out and a box of glowsticks, Carrie-Bri was eating sauerkraut for breakfast and chatting with Mom at the kitchen table.

“Well, hello there,” Mom greeted them as usual. “Did Puck wake up in the storm last night?”

“He never wakes up for anything,” said Collette. “You all were up?”

“Yeah, Carrie was saying it was like the Von Trapp family over here.”

“I was already sleeping on the living room floor because my back hurt,” said Carrie. “And then Linnea-Irish was on the couch. Then Francis comes pounding up the stairs with his fingers in his ears because of the thunder, and he’s calling up Joe who had the camera to take pictures of the storm. And they’re all excited pointing out things in the sky… I can just see the two of them having their own storm chasers show…”

In the late morning, while Collette worked with Linnea-Irish, Mom and Carrie and Francis took Puck to the store. They returned with a pack of blue Playdough and orange for Puck, and a jack ‘o lantern pumpkin plant for Linnea.

In the afternoon, Collette and Puck were dropped off at home for the evening activities:

1. Playing ‘mud soup’, as Puck called it, in the street from last night’s rains.

2. Washing out the mulch in the landscaping with the garden hose; (this was unintentional).

3. Collette made the unfortunate error of showing Puck the wild strawberry growing in a patch beside the expired hyacinth, which, as a result, he popped into his mouth before Collette could be certain that it was, indeed, a wild strawberry.

4. Collette punched in the mole’s holes, noting that they had already eaten all her tulip and beautiful Rembrandt tulip bulbs. Although the fire red tiger lilies were about to bloom. And the mislabeled ‘orange’ (pink) roses already had done so.

5. Inside for a bath (wherein Puck dumped half the giant bottle of bubble bath), Playdough (which Puck smashed onto Bullseye) — “I’m makin’ him a happy face,” he said — and book reading..

That night, OLeif was rehearsing some Celtic fiddling for a church visit at Memorial on Sunday morning.

He returned between House Hunter’s episodes in Hawai’i and beautiful castle-locked Medieval village Northern Italy (with a Finnish-Italian couple) who found a book-shelved nook in the hills… with a box of chocolate brownie and goat cheese (after watching a brownie show-down on the Food Network)… oh, the effects of cable television.

The big news of the week involved the engagement of their cousin, Esther, on Mother’s Day on the Brooklyn Bridge Promenade. Likely to be married in the fall.

And OLeif had presented Collette with a late Mother’s Day gift: a blue cloth-bound journal.