New spring things
It's still early in the morning and Yali is sitting next to me on my bed with his tablet swiping through a series of horror film posters he's created since yesterday featuring a murderous teddy bear...
...while C.P. from the old school is texting about glue guns and lesson plans... asks if I can call her before she leaves for Puerto Rico...
I can hear Patience turning on the gas stove in the kitchen to cook eggs while watching SpongeBob before workbooks come out... she's looking very “teenager” that morning in an oversized Blues sweatshirt over tie-dyed maxi sundress in shades of chartreuse and an effortless messy bun waving on the top of her head...
“Your cousin was born late last night” I share with her... // “WHAT!” // eight pounds of baby just down the street, first Beta baby in the family... Patience immediately asks all the questions... heavily counterbalancing Yali's vastly less dramatic attempt-to-sound-more-interested-than-he-actually-is → “Oh?” while working on highly pressing projects... abstract baby announcements are just not so thrilling to an eleven year-old boy when both gatling Nerf guns need refilling...
Puck requires a pick-up out in O'Fallon mid-morning, so between classes we drive out ... “Another cousin was born last night...” I try out the same line on him... // silent thinking... “I don't even remember how many cousins I have anymore”...
While Puck and Patience then double-down on a Chick-fil-A lunch request, we spend awhile discussing unique names and too-unique names and names not unique enough... like that one time my extraordinarily common name got confused with another person of the same name during a background check, and there was a period of brief confusion as to how someone like myself could have committed such terrible crimes without anyone knowing about it...
Mid-afternoon... take a closer look at the fallen limb from yesterday and realize it's actually cedar... commission Puck to slice medallions out of it for me, like peacock ocelli... “Pay me ten dollars a slice” he jokingly grins before bringing out the hacksaw...
Yali then grabs the second hacksaw and a pair of work gloves → inspired... “Can I go saw something?”
Meanwhile Patience is packing dinner for the road... orange wedges and spring peas in a thermos...
Driving south by three o'clock... grab the Toyota keys from Sally's farmhouse... then meet Linnea-Irish and the girls at a large patch of woods by the creek where Yali has already asked... “If I see one, can I tame a snake?”...
Morel hunting in the soft grass and swampy muck of recent floods... two hours lazily walking the light undergrowth under watery sun that prods aside silver cloud maybe twice... little "A" walks with Patience for awhile looking for other treasures... orange golfballs... a brown glass bottle... Big "A" joins for awhile then brings the girls home early... that's when the rest of us find a large cache of morels near the creek bank... about twenty of them and a solid haul...
Back in St. Louis county around seven o'clock... quick stop at the store for cans of Pringles – 2nd grade Spanish class needs empties to make awesome parrots – and “No, kids, you can't have the two-pound jar Nutella”...