Sixteen Days
“You were right, Puck,” I told him from the Cardinals wall calendar in the kitchen that morning. “It was a full moon last night. I thought Sun had told me it wasn’t until tonight. I guess I heard wrong.”
Puck, never one to be proven wrong himself, informed me intelligently that, “Good. I win. You losed.”
In a quick-melt of light snow that morning, it was still too cold to try for any outdoor physical activity. Therefore, Puck and I switched on the dance grooves mix and tried our hands at ballroom dancing, backed by Awolnation.
“Watch, Mom. I think I already know how to dance.”
One chubby paw on my back, the other carefully holding my hand, he began his triangular footwork on the living room floor.
“Not bad, man. How’d you figure that out?”
He looked up with a one-tooth-missing grin. “I Love Lucy.”
Towards the end of our twenty minute dance session, Puck tried to “dip” me a few times.
“Just lean all your weight against me, Mom. All of it.”
The problem was, on that very last dip, he tried to dip himself at the same time. One of those slow motion crashes to the floor. Hard. Fortunately, I had enough sense to throw my arm behind his head to cushion the impact. Fortunate for his head, at least. My arm looked a little red after taking the full hit.
Puck helped me up. “Mom, here, Mom. You need to rest. Go sit down, sit down.” He pushed me onto the couch and brought out his Angry Birds comforter to warm me up.
My arm wasn’t anywhere near a break, or even a contusion. In fact, my hip might have taken a harder blow than the arm. But I can’t say no to the compassion, chivalry, and generosity of my six year-old boy.
As we discovered more about animals in the Antarctic together that afternoon, Puck had thoughts. “Maybe the world was warmer back then. I think about this in the car sometimes, like when Adam and Eve were naked, how did they stay warm? I think when sin came into the world, the world became cold.”
As the afternoon rolled into the early evening, Puck pushed Crackers on her leash back through the front door just as the sky unleashed a small ice pellet storm, smashing into the warm grass. He wanted to stay outside and “dance around”, but I wouldn’t allow it.
“Moon Spinners.” Another never-before-seen Disney for movie night before pork steaks and sweet potatoes. As Puck settled back onto the old red couch to begin, a platinum-white sunburst spilled through the dark clouds in the west, an eerie unnatural glow through dripping rain and softly falling snow, mirrored off the pavement. The Midwest in January can still be beautiful.