"The Story" (also known as the latter half of July 8)

Yes, I know, I'm an awful pushover. I do whatever my friends tell me to do. :)

Alright, so, after the carwash, Violin came over to our house to help Daisy work on a project for VBS. They worked on the back porch of our house. The project was to create two, two-dimensional houses out of cardboard boxes. Violin had brought along several large cardboard boxes and five cans of paint (white, red, and green spraypaint; pale blue and gold liquid paint). They had quite a time trying to figure out how to build houses from their boxes. I sat on a lawn chair most of the time and gave them "helpful hints".

Occasionally, my mother would shout for me, and I would have to dash inside and help her find something—sleeping bags or sleeping bag sheets. My father was taking Brother2 (Brother1 is in Pittsburgh right now for a church camp) on a Boys' Brigade field trip to camp out in some mountains and go rappelling. The sleeping bags had apparently all decided to play hide-and-seek with us, and the same holds true for the sleeping bag liners, which were buried at the bottom of the boys' not-so-organized linen cubpoard. Digging through the green attic for the sleeping bags was like burrowing through an elderly relative's mind, trying to find some important piece of information--frustrating for everyone, and sometimes (when the highchair collapsed or the cardboard boxes decided to go for a slide) painful. Thankfully, the sleeping bag sheet eventually surfaced, and my father (who could be a rocket scientist) coaxed the sleeping bags out of their hiding places when he got home. So that turned out alright.

Back outside with Violin and Daisy, I helped by taping flaps shut, suggesting where to cut things, and (last but not least) tipping gold paint all over the sidewalk. Somehow, the stuff got on Violin and me, too. She was picking bits of glitter out of her hair on the way home afterwards. While she used the spraypaint, puffs of toxic chemicals oozed along the ground and made us all woozy. We started to make silly jokes a lot—especially Violin, who had been doing all the painting. While she painted one piece, the other pieces lay out in the sun to dry. Daisy and Violin made a white house, a red house, two doors, a couple of windows with shutters, and a windowbox, all ingeniously painted.

When Violin and Daisy were done, we piled everything into the Taurus and drove out to my grandmother's house. We dropped Daisy off so that she could start making supper (my mother, Daisy, and I were to eat supper with my grandmother since there were no boys at our house to cook for). Then we took Violin home. We tried to talk above the roar of the wind over the open windows, but it was rather hard. Violin told me that they’re taking vacation the week after VBS, and she described a time when a chipmunk, frightened by a storm, had climbed into the cabin bedroom that she shared with her grandmother. Her grandmother was awakened suddenly by the little furry thing scurrying across her face. *eeps* They managed to convince the chipmunk to go back outside (“It was a smart chipmunk,” she explained).

Back at my grandmother’s house, I sprawled on the cool carpet for a while, unable to move from the weight of weariness and heatstroke. My grandmother and mother tried to order some “clear turquoise” T-shirts from Land’s End, but they were out-of-stock. Then, while my grandmother made chocolate-and-peanut-butter brownies, Daisy cooked potato soup, and my mother helped, I ensconced myself on the computer and wrote a very long blog post about today, which is the one that you all have already read. Supper was quite good. The salad was especially delicious. I discovered a new sort of salad dressing, which my mother told me was my grandfather’s favorite. Since I don’t like salad dressing, I was pleased to find something that I do like: Catalina. It’s a little like sweet-and-sour sauce, but not so sweet or so sour. My grandmother’s salad had lots of radishes, onions, celery, and lettuce in it--a little bit like a pieced quilt, with all the different flavors and textures. After dessert, I sat at the table and scrapbooked while my mother, Daisy, and my grandmother played skip-bo, which is a complicated card game rather like Solitaire that I do not understand at all. We listened to the CD of the first concert from the arts camp I went to in June. It was nine o’clock by the time they were done playing.

I was packing my things up and happened to glance out the window when I saw a deer standing on my grandmother’s back lawn. For an instant, I thought it was fake—but then I realized that my grandmother doesn’t have any fake deer. The deer stared back at me, then moved her graceful neck down and began to lick the salt block that my grandmother had set out on the edge of her strip of yard. The others leaned over my shoulders and gazed at the deer. The deer would lick the block, then raise her head and look at us, swiveling her delicate ears, then go back to the block again. Her slender tail swished incessantly against flies. She was a soft brown color, with hints of gold and rose. She was so lovely. Eventually, she paraded quietly off into the gloom, her slender legs trotting over the short grass.

We left. Outside, the moon was as slender as the curve of white around one of the deer’s ears. A jet traced a column of purple smoke, like a scar across the sky’s pink western edge. Directly overhead, the sky was deep blue. Fireflies flickered in the tall stands of Johnson grass as we drove home. Smells of juniper, cool and blue, and of smoke from a barbecue, and of cattle blew through the open windows. Coreopsis, like pollen dusted from the sun, lay sprinkled thickly over broad, green fields. The sky hung lightly over the green earth. We took baths and went to bed when we got home, as always.