Missing Blooms
Another day of snows. This time, however, Mom had brought Frances out for his math session, as well as Joe and Linnea. Carrie-Bri was at home catching up on the third season of LOST, having earned some down-time. Rose was at home doing who-knew-what. Maybe squeezing the cats. Maybe painting endless strings of the same shape in 73 shades of gray. She had not been pleased with this particular assignment in her class: Design I.
“This is ridiculous!” she said. “Why 73 shades of gray? Why not 70? We asked our teacher why, and he just said because he felt like it.”
Her paintbrush stopped for a few moments while she vented.
“Looks like the easiest project I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Carrie, unsympathetically.
“Yeah, it’s easy. But it’s boring.”
Rose sighed and returned to her paint.
In other news, Collette was beginning to try to solve the mystery of what happened to the paperwhites that Denae had given her. They were about to bloom just as Collette had left for Israel. It wasn’t until that third week in February, however, that she finally noticed that they were missing.
“Did you forget about them and they died?” Collette asked OLeif.
“No. I watered them every day.”
“Then what happened to them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe someone stole them.”
It was a mystery.
Meanwhile, OLeif had brought up the mini trampoline that had once been Ivy’s, then the family’s. Puck immediately crawled on top of it and sat, scrunching his face in baby smiles and bouncing his chubby tummy up and down, trying to make the trampoline work. Linnea sat with him and bounced him lightly for awhile after putting her Australian knit cap on his head. Puck was thoroughly enjoying his ride and giggled.
Then Collette did her best to instruct Frances in his algebra while everyone else ate chicken strips over a well-repeated documentary on UFO’s.
“So obvious,” said Joe. “They’re flares.”
Collette went out for an evening walk in the cold after OLeif had returned from work. Several flocks of Canadian geese took flight in the skies as she walked down the road, calling to each other. When she stopped still to listen, she could hear the rhythmic whoosh of their wings in the icy air. She wondered if they had waited until just then to fly South, or if maybe they had merely decided to wait out the winter in the Midwest. As she rounded the corners, slapping through the slush, she saw two stragglers beating their wings furiously fast to catch up with their companions.