The Older Times
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Lonnie’s eighth birthday, already.
Collette was reminded that day of the English’s old house, before it had been torn down to make way for a new subdivision. They had owned an amazing back lawn – several acres of rolling green grass and trees – the old weeping willow at the basin of the dry lake. The Playmobile/Guest Room in the basement across from Bing’s room. The line of cabinets in the basement bathroom filled from one end to the other with a burst of bright yellow National Geographics left over from the previous owner. The cabinets across from the washer and dryer, also in the basement, packed full with glass jars. The barn full of sawdust in the horses’ boxes, the spare room in the barn with old bottles, nuts, bolts, and other leftovers. The animal graveyard and the violets by the barn, Adam’s garden, the pansies in front of the house. The dryer drum kept in the barn used for a good tumble down the hill in the backyard on fair Fridays, the back deck where they had eaten countless lunches of bagels and carrot sticks, the miniature television in the kitchen where everyone lined up kitchen chairs in rows whenever a movie was watched… There were many memories from the old English house.
Meanwhile, there were plans being made for the weekend. OLeif was to play music for the men’s retreat at church over Friday night and Saturday. Mom, Collette, Rose, Linnea, and Puck would head out to Grandma Combs’ to visit the Valley of Flowers book sale and then to Polly’s wedding shower in New Town on Saturday. Joe, Rose, and Francis would be attending a choir clinic with Cotton Mather instructing on Friday. And then Francis would leave for Beaumont with the Boy Scouts while Joe and Rose, apparently, would hit the road for pizza and Spiderman III with the rest of the kids. And Carrie, of course, was working as usual.
Collette realized that afternoon that the youth of the day seemed to be in some enormous network, connecting numerous times, personalities, places, ideas, and relationships into a single pool. The thought came through the phenomenon of facebook, for which OLeif had an account. It amazed Collette just how much, through the introduction of technology over the past years, people were able to keep relatively loose ties with one another without even the need to write letters or visit one another, perhaps not for years. Hadn’t Collette relied on purely emails, not even one phone conversation, to still keep up somewhat with her friends all of whom (excepting Diana) she hadn’t seen in two to three years? It was a rather interesting state of communication for the present generation.
Later in the evening, Denae dropped by for awhile with her sewing machines. Collette was to experiment with relearning how to use the apparatus for hemming curtains for Puck’s room and for the study. It slowly came back to her as Denae explained it. Back in the good old 4-H days, Collette and Diana had sewn their share of quilts, as well as etched glass, learned horsemanship, and tried their hand at cake decorating skills.
The most Collette could recall about the cake decorating classes was that the instructor’s son had been absolutely crazy and had a crop of dark blond curly hair, that he loved to play a computer game involving ants, and one day ate a bag of butterscotch chips while making the individual chips talk to one another. She also remembered that her final project had been a cake iced in white frosting with a pile of lavender blossoms all over the top to one side. They had also given their teacher, at the end of the class, a Depression pink Carnival glass bowl to add to her Carnival glass collection. Collette remembered visiting the antique mall with Mom to pick it out on behalf of their very small cake decorating class of three girls.
Meanwhile, the rain and the budding green continued to enchant the world.
Randomly – sometimes, Collette was starting to wonder if Carrie and Eve wouldn’t just end up moving to Australia permanently after their visit…