Rainy Days - for Buying New Shirts, Color-Coding DVD's, and Lodging Objects in One's Tonsil
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
[6:49am] Collette spent all of Emerald Blots’ 19th birthday, thinking the day was actually Tuesday, instead of Monday. And she awoke to great aches and pains throughout her back, arms, shoulders, and neck (where OLeif had run up behind her at youth and grabbed her in such a way as to pop her neck thirty times). Could it only have been from stacking chairs in the hay barn? Was she getting old already, at twenty-one? In addition, she was having another trouble with yet one more foreign object lodged in her left tonsil, and it began to become irritating towards the evening.
But aside from tutoring several hours in the cold gray of the day, she was exhausted and fell asleep for an ungiven amount of time on the chair in the living room, during the afternoon. Subsequently, she did not fall asleep till midnight that night – an endless cycle. She also spent part of the morning while Joe and Rose listened to a sermon on Revelations, sewing up a rip in her jeans near the hem, and a hole wedged in her thick-knit lettuce-green sweater top (which she ended up stitching to the black shirt beneath the sweater)… Sigh. Some days were just that way, though nothing dreadful at all – just a nuisance from time to time.
In the afternoon, Mom was off with Linnea for her piano lesson. Mom had also been out all morning having her hair fixed (as Carrie had dyed it the evening before, and it had turned red). Mom was not pleased.
“I went from looking like Opie Taylor to a little short of Mrs. South,” Mom said, rolling her eyes – the way she did when she was frustrated with herself.
And she returned from the beauty parlor (not having her hair curled), looking more like Maria from “The Sound of Music,” but the curling helped and her hair looked much better by the evening.
And also during the afternoon, Carrie-Bri had been out and about with Elizabeth. Carrie later returned just in time to awaken Collette from the chair and show her the new clothes she had picked up. They included a medley of several ruby-red shirts and deep sea green tops (one of which had shining threads of sapphire woven through the print).
All Collette could remember (while seeing Carrie’s new change of wardrobe) was Ernest posting on his facebook account, that his girlfriend was the most stylish young woman, ever.
“Plato’s Closet,” Carrie said proudly, “nothing over seven bucks.”
Things of other note: The postage had just increased from 37 cents to 39 cents (as it did every three years or so now, it seemed) and the new two-cent stamps were lovely pictures of Navajo jewelry (and nothing quite so tacky as… well, Collette couldn’t think of anything just then, however, she knew that the post office had tacky-looking stamps from time to time). And fuel had risen to $2.45 again… Minuscule inconveniences – nothing over which to complain.
And Tuesday morning, they woke to a cold steady gray raining, hanging new glass globes upon the beanpod tree. It was a brilliant morning.
[20:23pm] Back at the house, Joe was chuckling a bit over his ACT readings, which included the following phrase:
“A good [English] score does not make you the next Jane Austen, and a bad score does not make you the next Bart Simpson.”
It was another tired-day, but it was good, as always. Carrie-Bri even received her synthesizer/keyboard music writer in the mail. And Mom was hosting another candle party for Mrs. Tecumseh at seven, to which Grandma, Denae, Aunt Petunia, and Lace would attend. Meanwhile, Joe was keeping an eye on the kids in the basement and color-coding the DVD’s. And Rose was wearing her new fashionably-scholarly glasses, jeans, a collared green striped shirt under a gray ballet top, and her hair was pulled in a dimensional pony-tail. Point was – she looked cute and like a young college girl. Although it did take a great deal of convincing on Carrie’s and Collette’s part to make her wear the glasses to choir.