The Cave, Part 2
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Tuesday morning, Mom, Collette, and Carrie-Bri entered the cave again. The night before, both Mom and Carrie had finished most of the painting. The walls looked stop light green.
“I think we’re going to try to make it look African,” Mom told her.
Carrie was busy cutting up an old orange shirt and an old yellow shirt into several strips which she tied around the handle of Rose’s “poky stick”. This would hang above the closet.
Mom had also braved the spiders’ nesting valley. By the time Collette and Puck had arrived that morning, under the bunk was cleaned out. No serious spider incidents to report.
Meanwhile, Joe was out in the garage, glossing the paint on the red civic with a “brick” (as it was called) – a spray bottle of special solution rubbed into the paint with a wad of special white clay. After it had been polished, Joe showed them the results.
“Rub your fingers across it,” he said.
They did. It felt like polished glass.
Puck sat in his bouncy seat in the middle of the chaos in the living room. On every side towered the junk yard. They kept him removed from any precarious piles, however. And he bounced happily, watching the “I Love Lucy” marathon from Rose’s DVD collection with keen interest. He slurped on his fists, ate his blanket, and giggled.
“Naughty squishy!” Carrie laughed, picking him up, after the blanket had been removed from his mouth.
Puck just laughed all the more.
Linnea decided to escape the mess and spent most of her day with her friend down the street. Francis also felt called upon to leave. And after leaving a happy birthday phone message for Chester, he took off to Creole’s for the afternoon.
Mom, Collette, and Carrie continued trying to make sense of Rose’s scattered interests, lying in heaps in almost every room of the house by that time. Most of it had to go. Carrie was not afraid to fill the trash cans. She momentarily tried to set the stained glass rooster lamp on top of Rose’s bookshelf. She stared at it for awhile.
“I just can’t do it. It’s hideous.”
The stained glass rooster lamp was removed. The piles of Rose and Linnea stuffed animals, including “Donald Duck” were dumped on the top bunk for temporary storage until Mom and Carrie could purchase a set of new bedspreads for the bunk that evening. Everyone in the Snicketts house (except for Mom, Dad, and Joe) had a bad habit of sleeping almost everywhere but on the actual beds. Most of the time they slept on the floor. It wasn’t uncommon for Carrie to wake up in the morning and find Francis, Linnea, the dog, and both cats squished onto the floor next to her bed. Mom decided that this had to change. The first step would be purchasing new bedspreads for Rose and Linnea and a mattress that actually fit on the lower bunk.
Despite what happened to the sleeping situation, they were finally beginning to make progress with the mounds of Rose “things”. Most of it was sent to the basement in tubs. By the time 4:30 rolled around, they had called it a day. And Collette and Puck were off again to pick up OLeif from work.
OLeif and Puck shared a conversation that night before bed while Puck stuffed his hand socks into his mouth. He had a great deal to tell his dad about exploring the jungle of Aunt Rose junk. It was a great adventure.