Last night there was the smell of about ten different perfumes coming from one end of the house, and I didn’t like it. Maybe it is a female dominance issue. Truth be told, I have about ten perfumes—but none of those smells were mine.
I went to bed with my daughter snuggled in next to me. She had vacated her room to help accommodate the perfumes. The silence was lovely. The warmth next to me—a five-year-old-sized ball of squirmy heat—was lovely. I began to melt into the sheets, every inch of me from toenail to eyelash melting there in agreement to give over to the exhaustion. With the light turned off, even the blackness was lovely.
“Oh no, the dark ages again,” the girl said dramatically. Good old Duck Tales. It teaches children what a Scottish accent sounds like and all sorts of tidbits from history that they can misunderstand and then put totally out of context.
Indeed, it is the dark ages around here, I thought. I’d spent the entire day—literally from sunup until sundown—in the castle kitchen as part cook, part kitchen maid, and part scullery maid. All of me, in many forms, waiting on behalf of the ten perfumes.
There were breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with desserts to be made of three varieties—omnivorous, vegetarian, and vegan—for the three special diets of the ten perfumes. I didn’t know the castle kitchen had so many pots available to cook with. And nobody was eating on trenchers, so there were dishes to be washed. So many dishes.
Were my fingers, which I could not see in the dark, shriveled up? Were they dried and cracked to the elbow? Were my heels flattened to pancakes from all that standing at the stove making pancakes?
There was the thought of the vacuum, and all that dirt tracked in all day long. The poor thing. It moaned with its last breath of battery, before being set aside to recharge at the end of the day.
Yes, recharge from the dark ages, I thought. The blackness almost overtook me, until an image of the dinner table popped into my head.
Ten teenaged nieces, all wearing cheap teenager perfume, along with a scattering of teenaged nephews and a few young ones, were squeezed in at the table and some spilling over into the adjoining room. An occasional adult was tossed in here and there for good measure. Every easily moved chair from every room in the house had been dragged in and shoved under the table in an eclectic variety to match the cacophony of human sound. All of them were making noise at once—laughing, poking fun at one another, an occasional argument that no one could take sides on because no one could hear it distinctly. It was beautiful.
“Totally worth it,” I mumbled into the blackness. It was worth my trashed guest bathroom, the bill for the weeks’ worth of groceries eaten in one weekend, and my exhausted vacuum. And I’m thinking to keep the fort they made with palmetto fronds.
Without a doubt I would make pancakes all day long for those ten giggling perfumes.
I decided I was at peace with the dark ages and was nearly within the clutches of the blackness when something emerged from the subconscious suddenly—
D-d-d-danger lurks behind you! There’s a stranger out to find you! What to do…just grab onto some Duck Tales! Woo-ooo!
And then the blackness took me.
Woo-ooo!