cleolinda | A couple of things I forgot to mention

You wanna know something hilarious? I had this Anne Taintor calendar last year (see icon for more of her work), and every month the text seemed to have some weird bearing on my life at the time. So I got another one this year, and it's been just the same... only more so. Here's April's text: "Of course it buys happiness!" It being money, of course. What did I spend most of April doing? Freaking out about our tax bill and our household debt. And then May rolled around: "Was she in love... or was it just allergies?" CREEPY. (I haven't mentioned the allergies since April, I don't think, but I've been sneezing constantly--so loudly yesterday that I scared the dogs.) So--okay, I have this superstition about not changing a calendar over until the first day of the month, or at least very late on the night of the last day of the previous month, but... I went ahead and looked at June:

A bride: "Love, honor, and... what?"

Now I'm just puzzled. And maybe a little concerned.

Oh, I almost forgot, my mother wanted me to tell y'all a story. Every summer, we have some kids on the street who decide it would be fun to play ding-dong-ditch. You know, ringing the doorbell and then running like hell before the door opens. Late at night, if you're these kids. This makes my stepfather very, very angry. One time he tried to hide in the bushes with a baseball bat to catch them, but they could totally see him so it didn't work. It's a very DAMN KIDS, GET OFF MY LAWN!! kind of thing.

So school let out for the summer last week, and what do you know, the doorbell rings one night last week. My mother goes to answer it and sees a gaggle of young girls--that's a fresh twist--booking it down the hill. But they go straight to the same house as always. (When asked, this neighbor always swears up and down that her kids and/or their friends didn't do it, or if they did, it was the friends who did it, not her kids. Her kids just tagged along. And then they all ran back to her house. Right.) But Mom's a little more slick than George. The front porch light's broken, so it wasn't on anyway, but the lights along the front walk were--so the kids had approached a dark and shadowy door, and the walk lights hadn't illuminated it any. They wouldn't notice anything, that is to say, if my mother stood in one of the recesses on either side of the door. (We have a tiny little roofed brick porch, you see--just big enough to stand in comfortably and not get wet if it's raining.)

So she waits. And she waits some more. Just chillaxes in the dark, in a nook beside the door, with the patience of the predator, for about, oh, forty-five minutes. And then she hears the girls coming back. She can hear them coming up from the driveway on the side of the house, up the walk and across the yard, and just as they round the little bend in the walk she steps out into the light like AN AVENGING ANGEL OF THE LORD and intones, "You'd better not ring our doorbell again tonight." The girls explode in this piercing choral shriek--I hear it all the way upstairs inside the house--and flee with a warning cry of, "IT'S THE LADYYYYYYYY!"

"Oh my God," my mother says when she comes back in, and she does a real live facepalm. "I'm That Crazy Old Lady Up the Hill."

"Maybe someday, if I'm really good," I say, with stars in my eyes, "someday I will be, too!"