6:50 a.m. Sunday morning.
It was a weekend like any other around here. What is amazing is how much I love being home and having a weekend. Yes, everyone likes the weekend, but not everyone has daily experiences like we do.
Weekend highlights:
Friday when I got home from work (training, actually) there was a pathetic message from my aunt asking, no begging, for me to call her. This required a quick trip to the grocery store to pick up a bottle of wine because Gladys is long-winded, in fact, long-winded doesn't cover it, but I can think of no other adequate description at this time--how about long-winded to the tenth power? It also requires great patience and artificial fortification for these phone calls. It turned into a pleasant, if tipsy, visit. I felt saintly afterward.
Saturday: All day Saturday, Sam, with frantic insistence, kept announcing," Chen's restaurant car fast!" I'll spare you and myself the repetition. Every few minutes. It started at 9:30 in the morning and Chen's doesn't even open until 11:00. Naturally, Miranda says she'd rather go there for dinner. Thanks, Miranda. Thanks, and oh yeah, sorry. We went about 2:00. Sam was very happy. She'd been asking for days and just doesn't understand that we're not eating out four or five nights a week. She'd like to, though.
So all was well. All was good. Then I remembered, finally, that I needed to pay bills. That necessary evil that had somehow escaped my attention all week, even though it is written on my message board. So I was at the computer paying bills and Miranda was taking a bath. Miranda's baths are long, drawn-out rituals. No idea what spa treatments or meditation techniques go on behind that closed door, but I do know that if Miranda is taking a bath, someone else must be on Sam-duty (which means being in the house and mobile as opposed to being in the shop or the garden).
So I'm paying away and Sam comes up to my bedroom door and gives me that look that says something like, "what are you doing in here?" So, I replied to her silent query with, "Just a minute, honey, I'm almost done". She turned around and left. My minute turned into five and then I realized it was too silence. Silence tends to be ominous in our household and inspires a sense of impending doom. The question always is, "If it's quiet, where is Sam and what is she doing?"
Occasionally these fears prove to be unfounded. At other times our fears are not only realized, but far surpass what our imaginations could concoct. This was one of those other times.
Quiet in the house. First stop: Sam's room. I open the door and she is not there. But there is a small, toy teapot in the middle of her floor. It is wet on the floor as if she spilled something while filling her teapot. No big deal except that it looks like she filled it with Mountain Dew...I don't buy Mountain Dew. I pick it up and sniff it. Yep...She peed in her teapot.
Unsure what to do with a teapot full of pee with Sam still missing, I walk around carrying it. And I search. Quickly. The first impulse is to run out the front door and check the street, because if she's bolted, for whatever reason--usually boredom--she can get far fast. But she usually doesn't leave the property (usually, I said, meaning that there are those nightmarish times when she has left), so not checking out back would be stupid and put ideas into her head.
I go out the sliding door to the porch and I find Sam. She is returning from the shop. She is running. Her dress is hiked up around her waist and her panties are around her ankles and she is heading to the back door which opens into my bedroom.
"WIPE!!!"
I enter the shop, thinking I know what to expect. Her old porta-potty (hospital-style) is stored in a tiny room in the shop. It had been removed from her bedroom because she'd been using the bathroom consistently and I hated having it in the house if she didn't need it. It had then been removed to this tiny room because I got tired of her going out to the shop to poop.
So I enter the tiny room and I lift up the lid...And I will spare you all my powers of description and all the adjectives that sprang to mind. Let us just say, this was not Sam's first trip to the tiny room.
I could not face it. Don't forget, I'm still carrying a teapot of pee. I went back to the house and into my bathroom, because of course, Miranda is still having her bath. I dump the teapot and am pleased to see, especially since she's now sitting in my bed, that Sam had followed my desperate command or plea. Unsure what to do with the teapot still, I just stick it in the dishwasher and figure no one will ever know. Right. Then I fill up a plastic dish pan with HOT water and return to the tiny room. The porta-potty bucket needed a soak and I figured I could deal with it the next day. And I did.
Sunday morning: Sam awakes around 5:00 a.m. This is so unfair. Saturday had been a 4:00 a.m. morning. I continued to doze. Occasionally awoke to check on her and dozed some more. Then that ominous silence penetrated my subconscious and I sprang out of bed in a panic. I happened to glance out my bedroom window, since I never close the curtains properly, and I could see Sam standing at her pool.
She hasn't swam in it in a couple of weeks. It looks like Shrek's swamp. But she wasn't quite in the water yet and she was MESSING with something. Slippers, robe, and out the door. Then I came back and got my camera. By the time I got back, Sam was in Miranda's kayak with the paddle sitting in the bottom of the pool. Six to eight inches of clearance on either side. I did nothing. I shook my head a few times and tried to get pictures that wouldn't get me arrested for child pornography.
She had fun. When she was done she ran in through that back bedroom door again and I tried to straighten up the pool area. When I returned indoors I went to check on Sam. She hadn't used a towel, not even a little. She had been sitting submerged in Shrek's swamp, remember. And now she was sitting in my bed, in between the sheets. Here's where I give a small sigh.
Later we went to the park and she had a last swim in the creek. Miranda made it to mid-thigh. Sam submerged and said, "Cold, cold" several times. No one else was in the creek, save a dog who was fetching and swimming. When the dog got out it was shivering all over. But it was a lovely Fall day. A gentle breeze, leaves on the ground. All things considered (and put into perspective), it was a nice weekend.
Posted by: |