This is School
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
A distant rumble of thunder before 2:26 in the morning…
The pipes had been droning a lot lately. A low lone fog horn in the deep recesses of the house. Switching on the faucet for a few seconds usually remedied the problem.
“Mama? Could you be a gentleman and sweep up these popcorn kernels for me?”
Puck had been busy reorganizing the kitchen cabinets. Apparently some loose kernels had been forgotten in the air popper.
“Mama? Could you give me this cloff [cloth] so I can polish my telescope. Every day?”
Puck’s self-applied morning regimen continued, after stuffing his jams back in the bottom drawer and combing his hair, just like OLeif.
Also, OLeif had suggested that Puck begin constructing his own daily, or maybe semi-daily, journal, which was an initial success. Followed by arranging drink coasters and rough black tree bark in geometric patterns on sunshine-splashed linoleum, while Collette tinkered through Spanish Lesson 8.2.
The corner of such and such had the potent odor of green-fruit lime that morning. Puck stormed onward, two-wheeled, the rise of his helmet imagining a battleship operator.
“Isn’t this fun school?” Collette asked Puck after awhile.
“School?”
“Sure. This is P.E. That’s what kids do in school.”
Anything to make school sound less Hobbes-&-Calvinistically-horrible.
Over a cheddar-paprika quesadilla, Puck fingered the little lockbox key he had collected from Gloria’s china cabinet in a red glass bowl…
“If I don’t find out soon what this key is for, I’m going to be dead with mystery,” he smacked detective-like, shaking his head.
“What does that mean?”
“It means, I have to know.”
While Puck wrapped it up with a cup of skim milk, Collette tried to lure Madeline out from under the bed with a little catnip.
Un-success.
There was some “tinkering” going on in Puck’s room during Quiet Hour. When Collette checked in sometime later, Puck proudly showed her the nail he had – somehow – pushed into the Easter green wall, on which he had hung the pink pig chalkboard given him by Grandma Snicketts.
“Isn’t that great, Mama?”
Dimples.
So much for that ever-eluded rain.
Joe had been served up hail, high-speed winds, storms, and even a funnel cloud already, while St. Louis remain soaked in heat. At least Friday was headed for the high 60’s. It was a strange thing – weather-talk. In most cases, discussing the weather was deemed last-resort-I’m-bored-and-awkward conversation. In most cases. That is, unless you were a Snicketts. Then it was… well, it was sort of a compliment.
“How much times have I read my Bible?” Puck wanted to know in the afternoon.
“About twelve times, I think.”
“And when we read it again, it will be twenty thousand.”
Weeding and vine-tying middled the afternoon.
Collette tore a fresh green clump near the garden hose.
“Those are big weeds,” Puck noted, slurping a double green popsicle. “Those are mamas and daddies and uncles.”
The pavement was completed scalded. Collette knew it wasn’t going to happen, but they tried to cook an egg on the road anyway.
It didn’t work.
The first in a year’s subscription of Missouri Department of Conservation’s magazine, Xplor, for kids arrived in the mail for Puck from Grandma Snicketts.
Before Puck’s plunge in the Great Barrier Reef of the hallway, Collette read various library selections aloud, one of which included a cat falling into a pond…
“Mama. I kind of feel sorry for that cat.”
“Don’t be. He was going to eat the chameleon, Pequito.”
“But, Mama. Be kind to your enemies.”
OLeif scooped up a package of Cosmic brownies and a copy of Swiss Family Robinson for Puck and a baseball literary-autobiography for Collette from the library on the way home.
Rose checked in with rave work reviews by the big guy in California.
And Maddy was daintily sprawled on the windowsill, which was just a little too narrow for her own good…