Stay Inside Sundays
When I opened the door to leave for church that morning, it was the kind of cold that almost made you choke on it. Windchill at negative ten, and not improving. We weren’t even three weeks deep into winter. That’s why Spring Training exists.
Yali sat in his highchair at the Silverspoon house: sopa de carne. Puck and Ansel consulted together on the living room floor around a mountain of Legos. Between the eight year-old and the twenty-two year-old, they craft some inventive creations. Oxbear made paninis. He has a way with food; I even ate crunchy coleslaw on purpose for the first time because he decided to stuff some in my sandwich.
“Have your veggies,” he admonished.
Puck had an announcement for me as he threw back some Sun Chips. “Hey, Mom! Guess what? You’re short! And skinny!”
Always eager to be the town clown, I’m not sure he exactly meant it as a compliment, but I’ll take it.
Before we left for the Big House, Puck ran around the back deck, smashing crusty patches of snow in his red wellies. “I EXTERMINATED THE SNOW!”
Yali was right behind him, fascinated, dragging bare fingers through frozen white stuff. I wondered why he was doing it at first. And then I realized he had never seen snow before. This was his first genuine accumulation of snow, and it was completely foreign to him. No wonder he wanted to touch it.
At the Big House, since Mom was still gone on an Illinois B&B weekend for Aunt Day’s 60th birthday, we played jackbox.tv for an hour or more – something Rose picked up from Annamaria and Thunderbird.
Elmer and Jaya left early. They were driving to Florida at eight that night to catch a week-long cruise to the Bahamas. They were reminded by Carrie-Bri not to pull out any stingray barbs, if so stabbed.
“Guys,” Elmer announced, “I have ALL the Beatles downloaded for our drive to Florida tonight.” He began to sing.
“Uh, Jaya, do you want earplugs?” Carrie-Bri asked.
“Oh. I have some.”
Back home, Oxbear took over dinner duty and put together grilled cheese filled with slices of hot dogs for the boys. Puck, in approval of this new invention, decided to call them “grogs”.