Back door is open this morning, as it is warm. Not the door ~ the air, stupid. A few minutes ago, I heard what I can only describe lazily as a crash or bang, or two close together, and I got up to go in there, and on top of the antique white stove is grey and black McKinley. The stove has a fold down porcelain cover, and he's standing in the middle of it, like a stuffed coyote, holdin still to see if I will see him before he commits to any evasive maneuvers.
What can you do? I yell, "No!", and Get Down, Get Funky, and he decides he'll wait to see if I move into any real range.
That kind of stuff makes me mad. But they still do it.
This is not his first trip to the kitchen counter. The last time, he ~ oh, never mind.
Well, wait ~ the last time he almost broke an antique bottle. Hundred years old or so. It was standing on the glass-topped light table that is in the middle of the kitchen. (Isn't yours?) There's also a depression glass bowl filled with neat Japanese and Russian glass sea net floats, and glass vases of flowers and fruit, and tomatoes, which are a fruit, but I bet you didn't picture them, when I said fruit, so this is a helper.
Right now there's purple dahlias and peach gladiolus. And soon, today, cosmos.
So he got up there, naughty naughty, and he tipped over one of the bottles, onto the glass table top. Let me telleth you, that made a WHACK, and I came azoomin. It wasn't just a whack whack, it was a whack! followed by other woahlies and plapcks, because the one he decided to knock over, the hand blown antique medicine bottle he selected as the best medicine, was the container for MJ's silver-blue-grey marble collection. They came shooting and sniffing their way out of the bottle like blood out of a leak and made runs for it, across the glass. It was a break-out. Then, o course, they all headed lemming-like for the cliffs and the wooden floor. "Better dead than bottled." (A common Marble Motto.)
He makes me mad.
Why can't he tip over something at his own house?
Heedless to say, I headed straight for him, this time. He ski-daddled. But he'll be back, like cute psoriasis.
I couldn't immediately see what he had rousted this time, atop the stove. The weird plant from Zanzibar is still here in it's pot; the ceramic Fifties Stuff.....
Aha. In the big wooden garden window above the stove, are nestled, for safety, the antique ink-well bottles. They're purple and blues. About fifteen or twenty of them. One, in the middle, isn't, in the middle. It's impossible to get behind this behemoth gas range, but that's okay, because it has legs that lift it above the floor, as good legs should, and soon that beautiful tidbit of history and glass making and torturous penmanship classes in a little wooden schoolhouse and aging patina/solar radiation will be back in it's translucent and shimmering spot.
I bent down, ow, squee-ow, and got onto what's left of my knees, and looky ~ it's not under there. Nope, it's not. Because it's down the furnace vent.
I had tooken the grate off of that one to put it over there for the appraisal, and forgot to get another.
Why doesn't he hide something valuable forever at his own house?
When he comes in here again I'm going to have words with him.
"No more Special Sauce for YOU, McKinley!" |
