Transformations

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Back on the ranch, Carrie had been dishing out the usual: hair trims and colors. Mom and Frances got the trims. Joe got the dye. And Rose got the bangs. Linnea was left out of the picture, much to her relief. And Dad had been thankful since Carrie entered her hair-dressing phase at fourteen, that his haircut had been, and would remain, the same since the 1980’s.

Rose had just returned from work with her new do, which she had prepared herself that morning before leaving.

“Your hair looks… interesting,” Carrie told her as she came into the living room.

Rose’s dark locks were standing out in various directions from the crown of her head.

“I can’t believe you went to work like that,” Carrie told her.

“No one cared,” said Rose. “It was an undertaker’s convention.”

Puck was sitting in his bouncy on the counter, rocking it in order to take off into orbit. Mom was opening a package of brightly colored plastic rings and a green frog rattle. “Grandma’s House Toys”, she called them.

“Oh, no!” Said Linnea. “They were made in China! We can’t give them to Puck!”

Collette checked for recalls. There were none.

“Let me lick them first to make sure they’re okay,” said Linnea, in all seriousness.

She spend the next half hour washing and rewashing the rings in a sink of soapy water in the kitchen before she would let Puck play with them.

After a run to Trader Joe’s, Linnea was handed a coloring page of a headless horseman without the horse which she could color for a contest in order to win Trader Joe’s gift cards. When she left the room to look for more colored pencils, Frances got himself in the doghouse by drawing angry eyebrows on her pumpkin-head man.

Meanwhile, Carrie, who was obsessed with a newly-discovered British automobile reality show, “Top Gear”, relayed funny stories from the episodes.

And Puck rolled from one end of the rug in the living room to the other. Successful day for the little nipper.