Those Lazy Afternoons
Sunday, March 18, 2007
It was another cold one. Spring would arrive at 7:07pm, late Tuesday evening. The squirrels continuously frolicked from one of the telephone wires to the another, making their rounds before sunrise. What could they possibly do all day, those squirrels? Ornery critters.
In good news, Carrie-Bri seemed to have passed the first two-week mark of school without going insane between working full-time, plus weekends at Columns, and successfully completing all six masters classes assignments and extra credit projects thus far. Fourteen weeks to go, for the first semester.
Sunday was a lazy day. Church was followed with Reuben sandwiches (where Collette actually consumed sauerkraut, intentionally, for the first time in her life) and what tasted like a thick chocolate peanut butter brownie cake for dessert.
While Denae prepared the meal, she worked on getting Curly motivated to change out of his church clothes.
“But, Mom, I like this shirt.”
“Boy, you’d better change out of that shirt or no lunch,” she warned.
Even this unpleasant suggestion did little to encourage Curly out of the collared shirt and tie. After several more warnings, Denae reached into the pantry for her desired tool of discipline.
“This is what my mama used,” she said, marching over to Curly with a raised fly swatter in her hand.
After battling it out for a spell, with Curly laughing almost hysterically at the sight of his mom swinging a fly swatter at him, he finally gave it up and went to change out of his church clothes. Perhaps it was because of the enticing aroma of the Reuben sandwiches. Or maybe it was the flyswatter. Either way, one of the methods worked.
After watching a sort of futuristic-type film during lunch, there were errands run, and OLeif dropped Collette off at the house, where Carrie-Bri and Elizabeth were just leaving to attend a concert at Webster. Collette hurried inside to get Rose out to the car so that she and OLeif would not be late for youth.
Upon coming inside, Rose was grumpily parading around the house with a wet head of (what appeared to be black) hair.
“I’m not going to youth,” she declared loudly, glaring at herself in the mirror.
“I guess not,” Collette replied, noticing that her eyebrows were also covered in dye.
So OLeif took off for youth, and Collette stayed at the house to play several rounds of Life with Linnea while Mom tried out some canned pretzels in the oven.
Soon, Rose finally perked up and washed the dye out of her hair.
“Go look at my frog,” she said later. “He already ate a whole grasshopper.”
The girls had put the little fellow in a small glass aquarium with a white rocky beach leading down from one side of the tank into a clear water pool on the other half. A tiny oblivious cricket meandered across the rocks as the little frog sat suspended in the water near the shoreline, watching the sun set.
Collette felt sorry for the cricket.