Wind, Bugs, and Broken Buttons
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
That morning, the sun lit up the trees like topaz.
OLeif and Puck were in the living room.
“You know what he did?” OLeif told her later. “I ran my clean sock in front of his face back and forth, and he stuck out his tongue trying to lick it as it passed. He kept wincing at the taste.”
Collette noted that OLeif emphasized the word “clean”.
Collette spent most of her day finalizing Israel paperwork to get it out of the way before deadlines approached. Collette was pleased to discover that they would be spending New Year’s Eve in Nazareth. (It was a little funny that OLeif and Collette had still never had a New Year’s “midnight moment” together, ever. There were always youth parties, falling asleep before twelve, etc.)
There would also be a layover in London, which meant that the whole flight experience might be longer than Carrie could bear. Anyone who had ever traveled with her knew that spending more than (maybe two) hours in a car or plane might possibly send her over the edge. She had already considered bringing prescription-strength sleeping pills for the flight.
That afternoon on the porch, Puck sat in his Bumbo and ate his mom’s Italian book while Collette read to him about great buildings around the world. Puck had a bad case of the munchies, and before he gnawed the book to shreds, Collette replaced it with his ring of plastic keys after a few tears had been shed over the parting of ways with the Italian book.
They watched summer bugs blown around in the wind. The sky was clean blue. Pines and cottonwoods rustled.
Inside, Collette smashed fruit flies between her palms, all of which had decided to nest cozily in the banana bunch and red pears on the counter.
OLeif was out for Frisbee golf with friends from work during lunch.
Puck happily greeted his bedtime bottle in hand-socks and footy pajamas. His drowsy gray eyes passed in and out of consciousness as he did his best to keep up a continuous chug while his little arm occasionally flopped up and down against his side in his sleepy happiness.
That evening, OLeif indulged his appetite for previous episodes of House, regarding hallucinated alien abductions, brain surgery, and absorbed twin tissues, great stuff that it was.
Before shutting things down for the night, OLeif dipped himself chocolate ice cream and peanut butter while Collette tried to smooth out her stiffened left knee from the paddle boats on Sunday. Her joints had a habit of popping loudly, even at such a young age. And her left knee was the worst of them.
That night she had dreams involving a visit by Catalina, herself, Carrie-Bri, and some others to the school which Relevance and Kitts attended (somewhere out in Missouri). They made a giant dirt cake in a hill in a field, which was apparently edible and took all of Sunday to construct. They climbed through old brick historical buildings with candles in the windows to get from one place to another. And Kitts had decided not to finish her degree because her computer keyboard buttons (mainly the “Enter” button on the keypad which was “loaming” as Relevance put it (whatever that meant)) were not working properly for her algebra and some sort of inferential statistics classes. So she was calling it quits.