Sinners and Saints
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Collette woke that morning to listen to the Anonymous Four. It reminded her of days when the Snicketts and English families studied the Dark Ages, the Medieval castles, ladies, knights, and feasts. In fact, both families had held separate Medieval feasts at their houses. The Snicketts had invited the four grandmas and the English family had invited Mr. and Mrs. Dinner. All the kids had dressed as a Medieval character. Collette had been a lady in a golden silk gown and a silver crown, Carrie had been a jester in elven shoes and an old clown costume (which Dad had worn trick-or-treating when he was a kid), and Joe had been a little knight. They recited poetry, displayed model castles and many books which they had read on the subject, Medieval music, and tissue paper stained glass windows (which they had made after reading The Glassmakers of Gurvin). In a day before Joe could pronounce his “l’s” – when his turn came to recite, he stepped up to the brick hearth in the living room in front of the Snicketts family crest, pacifier in his mouth, plastic sword and shield in hand, and recited very slowly:
Old King Cooooh…
Was a merry old sooooh………………..
And a merry old soh was he…
He cawed for his pipe….
And he cawed for his boh…………………………………………….
And he cawed for his midderwers fwee!
There was much applause and then it was onto dinner with bread loaf trenches, eggs, greens, meat, and other Medieval fair. It was a fine feast, and all of the grandmas were given elegant lady-in-waiting hats or crowns.
Those were the days Collette and Carrie woke up at five in the morning before Dad left for work to do their school and finish by eleven in the morning for tree climbing, road-biking, pogo-sticking, roller-blading (or roller-skating in Collette’s case). Carrie would make her worlds up in the treetops and insist to Bing and Annamaria every other Friday, when get-together was at the Snicketts, that there was a real other world at the very top. Sometimes they believed her, sometimes they didn’t. But they all climbed trees and hung things from the branches. One tiny little branch on a particular tree was very special, being hooked near the end, and it became their cider dispenser. And Carrie always climbed the trees in terribly windy days when the late blue sky of the afternoon blew in the fluffy whites before the evening thunderstorms rolled.
Meanwhile, Wednesday was another day for Rose to come into the office and finish her project of cleaning and alphabetizing the books in the library and to study for her Egyptology exam. Joe dropped her by a whopper for lunch.
Before she dug in, however, Rose wrote a message on Collette’s computer:
Pigs at the church ate all the corn in the field. Collette said “O MY!! WHATEVER WILL I DO”
Later, Rose aided in sabotaging Ivy’s desk for her return the following week – a gigantic framed photo of a fly on the wall, a doodle of a spider on the white board (Sinai walked by and wrote “Ivy” next to it, with an arrow pointing to the spider’s face), an ugly photo of a spider on her computer desktop, and Sinai also placed a wooden hinged snake in her desk drawer. Ivy was to return to some frights.