No Man's Land
Sunday, August 14, 2011
In which memory lane is revisited via method of great green slug and wary offspring…
Rather horrific dream for Collette.
Inspired dream for OLeif: revolutionary software that actually might completely change the tone of work at work…
Puck marched in that morning, as usual.
“My eyes… my eyes… is confused,” he said, rubbing them.
“Woke up too fast, eh?”
“Yeah…” he grinned, cuddling himself next to his mama.
To church, to church…
Low cloud canvas; sun streams.
While Collette was waiting in the hallway to pick up Puck from Sunday School with the dads of the other children, she was informed by one of OLeif’s buddies about Puck’s antics during the singing portion of the morning…
“Mrs. Swiss was asking the kids how God blessed them that week and Puck raised his hand and said, ‘Yes. Mrs. Swiss. That is a very pretty watch.’”
Back to the house where Rose was sitting on the driveway stirring a bucket of antique hardware in cleaning solution for her refurbished dresser.
While Carrie-Bri fixed a Tim Ferriss lunch menu… to the inevitable dismay of Francis…
Rose was talking about a special peanut butter recipe invented by a Wash-U professor to aid malnourished children in Haiti and Somalia.
Linnea was accoladed for her prime position on the volleyball league: ‘Libero’. She would even wear a special jersey. She was the team member responsible for doing the diving.
Puck playing MYST on Rose’s iPhone…
A little necessary scheming, if scheming it could be called… Well, in fact, actually, it was not scheming at all. Purposefully Prepared Planning.
Postcard from Carrie’s geologist friend, currently living in Botswana.
And during the meal, they discussed city pride, etc.
Following lunch…
Mom brought out the photo album of her and Dad’s early days at the old farm, once owned by Great-Grandma Combs. It was time to visit it once again after 30 years and see if it still existed.
Road trip.
Green slug.
Charged engine.
Everyone but Joe, who was still in Colorado for several days.
Old stories about the farm, including the always-told tale about how Dad knew for the first time that he was going to marry Mom… when he saw her white-washing the old outhouse on the property. O, the tales of poetic love…
Out to the waiting van while Rose talked about wishing she had melted down Mom’s and Dad’s old brass bed to create reclaimed hardware for the dresser…
Linnea took her seat with a bagged giant wad of mozzarella and a steak knife. She groaned, sitting further in the back next to Carrie…
“Don’t groan when you sit by me,” said Carrie. “People pay good money to sit by me.”
Then Rose and Linnea began arguing over the origination of bottled water…
“They come from public water supplies,” said Rose.
“No they don’t. It says on the back they come from the mountain springs of Fiji,” Linnea retorted.
“I read an article about how they falsified those claims…”
Thundering down the road towards Warrenton…
Francis nodding off; all the girls snickering at him.
Stop-off for a case of bottled water; Francis walk-in.
“I guarantee you he’ll come back with cookies,” said Carrie.
Francis could never resist a sweet-snag. Sure enough…
“Nutty bars?”
OLeif and Puck split a package.
“Cheers,” said OLeif.
They clunked their bars together.
As they arrived in no-man’s land, they flew past a car junkyard.
“We’re here!” Puck announced.
Laughter.
Then a dinky town came into view, sometime after the peach farmer in overalls on the corner…
A town of… uninhabitation?
Bars-over-windows-shed advertising: steaks and burgers.
Clover Farm Stores General Store…
“Uncle Mo and I once picked up dinner there,” said Dad. “A can of cheddar cheese soup and another of green peas. That’s about all they had.”
Tiny Baptist church.
“Well, they got religion,” Dad said.
Shortly later… a sign for ‘FREE KITTENS… MANURE’.
Just splitting the border of, was it Lincoln? and into Montgomery…
“Yup, this is it,” said Dad, manipulating the monster down the dirt road. “This is it.”
While Mom and Dad began their stroll down memory lane, meanwhile, further back in the cavalcade…
“Oh… this is where all the murders happen… and the UFO’s.”
“Fire! Look over there! The UFO’s already had their fun today.”
“Dad, we might get caught in a flash flood down here.”
“What if we break down?”
“Dad, what if we lose an axle or something?”
“Then you can just go flirt with the farmer…” was Rose’s solution.
They rolled down the road past a few old houses, a few new, and then around a bend…
“Hey, there it is!”
Twenty acres, woods, a steep fifty foot drop on the other side of the road to Cuivre River…
“In the winter, Uncle Mo and I would shoot 22’s down there to hit the ice,” said Dad.
“Dad! Eyes on the road! I don’t want to die in Montgomery County!”
Then the swimming hole where the pilings of the old dock still huddled out of the water. The old farmhouse had been replaced with a newer model.
“Republicans.”
“Oh, yeah. Definitely a Republican house.”
“There used to be old wagon wheels back there by the woods,” said Mom. “Oh, there’s the field where my friend and I got lost. She started hyperventilating and wanted to crawl over the fence where a bunch of mean pigs were…”
“And our old neighbors, the Hawkins. Still there…”
“Was it dangerous when you and Dad were here too?”
Back on the main road again, passing some longhorns…
“Imports.”
Winding nowhere land. Pondered the lives of people living there in the 60’s and 70’s. Scent of salty hand lotion upon occasion. Wind thundering past open windows. Baby donkeys. Roller-coaster roads. A sign: ‘Pray for Rain’. Imagined roaming Indians. Another sign: ‘World’s Worst BBQ’. Western cloud-herd skies… Through Troy. Back into civilization. Dad stopped off for a 72-dollar fuel-up.
“Dad! Don’t turn off the van!”
“It’s gonna die!”
“Dad! Don’t do it, Dad!”
Fortunately for all of their pride, the van did not die.
While they waited, Rose propped up bare feet on the seat behind Puck.
“Why are your foots going down there?” he asked. “That’s gross.”
“No they’re not. They’re decorations.”
Puck was not convinced. “Yucky.”
They returned for more in-depth Meyers-Briggs discussion, ginger tea, and what else?: Cecil Whittaker’s [a picnic for Mom and Puck in the backyard], and Minecraft.
Towards home: Aldi. Inexpensive and foreign. Undiscovered hipster utopia.
Rose and Magnus drop-in for another night of film and discussion, including: It Crowd, Cosby, Uncorked, and Rose’s selection of Italian ices in: strawberry, lemon, watermelon, and blue raspberry, and soft-baked Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies. Also, Collette and Rose did a little research of the current mob boss of the Italian mafia. He was listed under the white pages.
The party ended after midnight.
Full, good days.