Variation on a Snow Day

I slept better Wednesday night, which usually implies a return investment in the form of a decent set of dreams: family vacation to New York City, Rose and I browsing a rare book shop on the corner, tables outside the door loaded with stacks of library copies: a volume of African baobab trees for Rose … Digging for three-inch metallic silver plated bugs in the dirt hill beside a practicing marching band at a high school, looking over a parking lot where the family waited to leave for some unknown event or destination.

Two inches in the night, maybe three. Oso had salted the driveway before the first flakes fell. And considering that the truck’s battery had just about died, he took the Mazda that Puck and I have now adopted – albeit still skeptically on my part – as our own.

We explored the Eyewitness world of computers after Puck took a jaunt in the cold yard. Several snowballs crashed against the living room window. Crackers pawed hard at the glass, trying to remove the plastered cold whiteness. A few snow angels. But ten minutes was all he could take.

“Wouldn’t it be great if pictures could come alive when you draw them?” he asked, his tawny head leaned against my shoulder. “Or we could jump into pictures, like different worlds? Maybe we can do that in Heaven. I would like to jump into a Minecraft world.”

Puck was doing his best to prevent Crackers from snacking on the ponytail palm during lunch.

“Mom! She’ll eat the plant! She’ll think, ‘Oh, how delightful!’”

The sun waxed topside, melting the streets, the lawns still carpeted white.

Puck rolled himself on his skateboard towards Quiet Hour, harnessing Crackers as indentured horse.

“Pull me, kitty power!”

Crackers was not interested.

Because we had no car to pick up groceries, Puck instead managed another seventeen minutes in the white stuff around four o’clock. No neighborhood friends home to participate in the cold.

He joined me for “I Love Lucy” and chicken salad in the kitchen as it grew blue and dark. We read more than half of “The Golden Key” before his bedtime, which Carrie-Bri had leant him from her personal collection. Memories of the Kirk library back in grade school days.

My months of editing continued into the night, and investigations into the Spanish language immersion school in the city, while Oso enjoyed dinner with his usual Thursday night round-up at Krieger’s in Chesterfield. I got the stacks of red-inked paper, and he got the blue cheese burger.

Adoption Status: Down: 4 years, 4 months; To Go: 1 year, 11 months.