Where thy mates of the garden...
Wednesday, October 4, 2006
Another day with Mom gone, and Carrie was again on the warpath to keep the house cleaned. Fire split from her eyes several times during the day.
After having made fresh blueberry-raspberry breakfast slushes for everyone to start the day, she took upon herself the feathers and warpaint and stormed each room one at a time.
Linnea took refuge on the back patio playing with colored chalk in bowls of water and little dolls until Carrie caught her making the mess and demanded an immediate clean-up. Suddenly Rose remembered that she had previously seen a large spider on the patio and no longer desired to stay outside, to play, or to clean.
“Help!” She cried on the other side of the glass door. “The spiders are going to get me!”
Meanwhile, the cat hid inside Joe’s bicycle box, which Carrie once again threw down the stairs in a small rage over the trail of disaster.
Later, Carrie sought her own sanctuary in her bedroom to practice her piano lesson. She had plans to camp at Meremac with Lucia and Queens, until Lucia called with news of poison oak. Both she and Queens had been infected and it was spreading. The camping trip was postponed until further notice.
“How did they get poison oak?” Collette wanted to know.
“I don’t know. When we went to the cave? They were falling all over things, into bushes… I don’t know,” Carrie sighed, mother-like.
So instead of preparing for camping, Carrie signed up herself, Lucia, Elizabeth, and Rose in a walk to cure autism for the following Saturday. And she cheered herself reading old letters and cards from her B.B.B.F., Bing, who had mailed her meticulous notes (addressed to “Pilot”) signed as “Gandalf” or “Dolphinistically Yours”.
Finally Carrie had cleaned the house enough to remove her headdress and tomahawk and make grilled cheese and tomato soup in time for dinner before Joe drove Collette, Rose, (Frances, who was picked up from Izzy’s), and Linnea to the Wednesday night happenings at church.
The evening wound up with a gathering of the junior high where there was singing, OLeif taught a lesson, and there was a rousing game of Four-on-a-Couch until time was up and popcorn and chips were thrown around the room over spilled sodas and general chaos. A vacuum was run, wet paper towels sopped up the puddles, and the room was left tolerably clean.
By the end of the evening, the news seemed to be made public that OLeif and Collette were expecting a little one in the spring. Despite the embarrassment of such public recognition, the evening ended as well as could have been expected, corralling thirteen mostly wild kids during two hours.