Dog Days

Summer in Minnesota!

This was June: Monday, fifty-five degrees. Tuesday? Seventy-five. Then rain. The next day, ninety and humid. The Matron practically pulled out an entire department store in order to clothe her family for the cyclonic shift in temperatures (and temperaments, but that's another story).

Children? More demanding than the weather, mostly because they have been Underfoot.

Here is the Matron, mopping the kitchen floor while creating the week's grocery list and pondering the meaning of life and wondering where the soul goes (if there is one) after death and fretting because she hasn't checked email in a week and wondering if the fifteen students who need attention over the summer really mind waiting another month or maybe (hopefully) they've forgotten those incompletes?

So, she's busy. Of course, 99% of this multi-tasking is in her mind, but still. She' sweating (that floor, after all).

Merrick: "Mom? Have you seen my set of owange dice and the fake fouw leaf clovew?"

Matron: "No. When was the last time you saw them?"

Merrick: "Chwistmas? But now I need them NOW. Can you find them?"

Clearly, this child did not read minds because if he did, he'd notice that his mother was in the midst of FINDING the answer to the meaning of (her) life, had just completed the grocery list and had given up on souls. If that wasn't being busy enough, what about the hands-and-knees mopping dance she was currently doing?

Matron: "They're too tiny. I'm in the middle of mopping."

Merrick: "I need them NOW!"

Matron: " Why don't you put out a magnet and see if they just miraculously toddle out of some corner and head to the magnet?"

Merrick: "Weally?"

Matron: "Really."

And when he zipped off in hot pursuit of a magnet ("Mom? Whewe's the magnets?"), the Matron was acutely aware that parenting dipped to a new low. Multiply this scene times two thousand and there was a week in her life during June.

So she took a nap. For six weeks.

Now that the urge to encourage 8-year-olds to play with matches has dissipated, the Matron is able to clear the foggy brain and return to all things prose and, possibly, better parenting. All three children are still alive and Satan's Familiar continues to terrorize. Something never change and some return, different.

She's back!