No flow'r of her kindred...
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Collette was reminded of a day years ago – perhaps it was the late summer or the late spring. Days when she would go to the library and get books with pictures of gardens around the world. She would look at them for hours. And one Saturday the family picked up Grandma Combs for an outing. Collette brought her garden books and her cassette player, where she listened to River Dance-like music and looked at the pictures and dreamed of her worlds. The drive was long and pleasant. And when they arrived at their destination – a house somewhere out east – to pick up a little table for Grandma, she had not known where they were or how they got there, but she thought she remembered emerald green and fields and small forests. It was in a day of a twelve year-old’s life that she didn’t need to ask where she was going or what she was doing. On the way back, they went by Baskin Robbins and Collette got a soda.
Other days she read about shepherds and green hills and the Ozarks for hours while she listened to Celtic River. Or she read the Seven Sleepers series on the way to a little village for young unmarried mothers in the hills of a late afternoon sunset with the family where Mom and Dad dropped off some donations. And she walked inside the little chapel as the sun was setting golden. Another Saturday they had driven out to a little town somewhere and Collette had looked through picture books on Princess Diana. In a little shop in the town Mom had seen a white saucer and tea cup ringed in flowers that she had liked very much. Collette bought it for her and gave it to her for her birthday. Days for Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Wuthering Heights, Elsie Dinsmore…
Elsie – the series written in the 1800’s that the Snicketts and English girls read separately and compared to see who had read further every Friday.
One day, Diana had proudly read ahead.
“You’ll never guess who Elsie marries,” she told Collette during lunch.
“Mr. Travilla,” Collette guessed.
“Collette! You read ahead!”
“I didn’t. I really didn’t.”
Days at the English’s old house where oatmeal was served in wooden bowls, a miniature pyramid had been built after being dug out of a block and sat on the buffet, where Diana and Collette tried to drink warm milk one night before they went to bed because they weren’t tired enough, where they tried to make a calendar for their moms with pictures of dolls and tea sets, where other girls came over one day and they cross-stiched towels and ate shortbread and mints, where they learned about slavery one Friday and wore bandanas in their hair and picked up cotton balls all over the cotton fields of the living room floor, where Carrie-Bri and Eve (for Collette’s birthday) dug their fingers into the frosting on the side of her cake (iced to look like a pizza) and got away with it, where they had homemade bread and candy pumpkins one October for lunch on the screened-in patio as rain came, where they spent weeks and weeks preparing a Christmas play (where Bing was to be Jesus) and the set was destroyed by the kids knocking over the mattress wall…
St. Lucia days – when Diana and Collette had dressed up in the Swedish Christmas tradition, white gowns, wreaths on their heads, and had served rolls and hot cocoa to both their parents at three o’clock and five o’clock in the morning on separate occasions.
The day they had the Olympics after Lillehammer – three dashes around the English’s basement. Eve took the gold, Carrie the silver, and Bing the bronze. Ice-skating on the carpet where the moms were supposed to be the judges and inevitably gave each contestant the same score and chatted with each other throughout every performance.
Those were the days of being nine and ten and eleven. The days of flowered jumpers, headbands, and adventures.
Meanwhile, the office brought the usual normalities of a Tuesday, including visitor letters sent to a Geni and a Lytossha and leftover caramel corn from Session the night before. And Rosemary had some sort of airwaves disease, a temporary swelling of the lungs, apparently. However, one could only tell by her occasional cough during staff meeting, that she was feeling under the weather. And the staff discussed the upcoming church hayride and bonfire.
Ivy had also uncovered the buggy gifts left on her desk, the wall, and her drawers – from the plastic bugs to the fly photo, the snake, and the spider on the desktop. Apparently, she had screamed over each one.