King & I

Hunting for Hornworms |

Funny Stories

It’s Tuesday so that means … well, when you are retired, it means nothing.

Today King and I drove to our daughter’s house to look for hornworms. It seems when we were there Saturday (while our daughter was out) to wait for a UPS delivery, King left the lid off the hornworm container when he fed the Bearded Dragon.

King, by the way, has a propensity for leaving lids off things — peanut butter, jelly, cookie jars, mayonnaise, etc. — and is also known for driving off with relatives’ only set of car keys. (Those of you who knew my older sister, Donna, will know how happy she was — not). Anyway, the little buggers escaped, and our daughter spent the better part of Monday, when she returned home, looking for them. I think she found eight. We went back today for look for more but didn’t have any success. I’m guessing if the Christmas tree is bare by Friday, we will know we didn’t find them all.

Our daughter was probably much angrier than she let on in her text messages to us, but I did notice that King did not volunteer to go look for them until we knew she would be gone.

Personally, I find them to be nasty little beasties, but then maybe if I were a hornworm I’d feel differently.

In the meantime, this is the week when the boys’ father has custody (they share 50/50) so King and I are left to our own devices (as in not babysitting) and releasing hornworms aside, King also replaced the trailer roof vent, cleaned screens and messed with the caulking around the windows.

I played with crafts and made a “thing” that is hanging in our window. It’s flower shaped and covered in fabric-mâché (as opposed to papier mâché) and beads. It’s not even that pretty, but for some reason I’m partial to it and it’s decorating the window of my reading nook.

I’ve also been playing my recorder.

They boys said they were getting recorders at school for music so when I woke in the middle of the night last night, I tore the trailer apart looking for mine. I figured we could have a jam session. I tried it out this afternoon, and I still remember the scales and a few songs, but Petra is not impressed.

My recorder is one of the few things of sentimental value I’ve kept all these years. When I was an exchange student in Finland I learned to play, and apparently talked incessantly about it when I returned. One day, shortly before my high school graduation, my younger sister and I were shopping in downtown Holland. There was a wood recorder in the window of Meyer Music House, and she convinced me I needed to visit the Apothecary shop while she went inside to look for an album for her boyfriend. She came back with the recorder wrapped in a brown paper bag. “Oh look! They now have flexible records,” she said. We both giggled all the way home.

When I graduated from college many years later, she got me an instruction book for it. A private joke no one but us understood.

So, life continues. Tomorrow is Wednesday and it means … nothing … other than perhaps we will make another trip to look for hornworms.