Powder Sugared-In
Monday, February 13, 2012
When Puck woke Collette at 5:55 that morning, somewhere within that hour, the snow was falling.
Puck had been in the bathroom for awhile. What Collette hadn’t realized before he deported there, however, was that he had taken with him a wad of black Play-dough. When he emerged some time later, all was explained. He stood proudly in the hallway – in the buff – displaying his masterpiece arranged on the floor.
“Wow, buddy. That’s a whole solar system of black planets you made there…”
Life had been revolutionized that morning. Thick cloth headbands purchased for $2.58 did the trick that tamed the “frizzies” away from the face. Highly irritating. But Monday saw brighter prospects.
Puck had his own decoration of the morning. While spending a few minutes coloring Francis’ birthday card, he added a little strip of green to his hair, this time, without knowing it.
The snow was still falling around the lunch hour. St. Louis style ravioli. Honeycrisp apples for dessert. A little David M’Intyre and Fox’s Book of Martyrs for Collette.
And OLeif was 3/19th through his semester.
He returned bearing ingredients to bake chocolate chip cookies for Valentine’s Day and Collette’s John Piper book from the library. Collette started up the soup and sandwiches in the early snowy evening. And OLeif fiddled a little accompanying Irish tunes for Puck, at table.
Collette knew she shouldn’t have opened the World Series Collector’s Edition DVD Series. But there was no helping it. After two days of waiting, she split the plastic and turned on Game 1. Puck avidly watched the first twenty minutes with her until he was distracted by the new stack of library books.
Meanwhile, the world was all lumps of powdered sugar.
In fact, it almost looked like a studio. Especially with that peculiar orange light post in the neighbor’s backyard. It looked like a sitcom set.
“Believe me, to pray with all your heart and strength, with the reason and the will, to believe vividly that God will listen to your voice through Christ, and, indeed, to do the thing He pleases immediately following that – this is the last, the greatest achievement of the Christian’s warfare upon earth.”
– Coleridge