savior and destroyer

Couch shopping after work is hard. The furniture store was dark and the parking lot was empty when we pulled up at 6pm. We got out anyway to look at the hours on the door. 

"Is that a bird?" We stopped, and all three of us tilted our heads to listen. I walked over to a dumpster under a street light, and a tiny black kitten ran mewing toward me. I scooped her up, and Gavin and Mike both ran in excited circles around me as we headed back to the car. Mike gently pulled the kitten off the back of my neck when she escaped my hands, made love-eyes and started squeaking at her, and I realized I would not be keeping the kitten. He needs the company anyway.

At work today, we suffered as a group from a strange bout of clean-it-ness, punctuated by impromptu yoga (which was Heather's fault). I assembled the Summer Reading Program mobiles and stood on a table to hang one above the kids' reading area, then peeled off the colorful clings and stared in horror at the state of the web- and mud-encrusted windows. A few minutes later I was standing outside with an industrial bucket of soapy water and my dress pants rolled up. People honked and yelled words of encouragement as I attacked the massive glass-covered building with a scrubber on a stick, shooing spiders and brushing grapefruit-sized wads of cobwebs off the children's windows. I banged the window and scrubbed extra hard where Heather's face periodically pressed against it on the other side. "'Scuse me, ma'am." I turned to find two young mormon boys in suits climbing off their bikes behind me. "Can I give you something?" A hand, perhaps? A power-washer? A boost up to the second story windows? "Here's a picture of Jesus." I started laughing, wiped my hands on my jeans, and stuffed it into my back pocket. "What's so funny?" I gestured at the building, my bucket, their bikes. "Oh... I see... sorry, here, maybe I could -" I was all set to hand him the scrubber, "- come by your house instead?" Haaahaha.

And so I have saved a baby, complicated and enhanced Mike's lonely life, and murdered possibly dozens of tiny hapless spidery souls.