Empty Crib

Delilah wrote in her journal, which she had inherited from her mother Bertha and continued, "I think my little man must be a holdover from another age. This morning after breakfast, when he had licked the last of the maple syrup from his plate, he smacked the table with the palm of his hand so it rattled the silverware and announced to the room at large, 'Good to the last drop! Makes a long winter shorter! Now time to go and fetch some wood!'

"I had bought him one of these computer games. I thought he might choose to go play it, it being so cold outside. Cold? I opened the door so Sir Barksalot could go do his business, and he just whimpered and slunk off and hid behind the couch. I stepped outside to see what might have scared him, and my breath caught in my throat. If I had died in the desert and been reborn off the coast of Labrador in the blue heart of an iceberg, I couldn't have been more surprised. I couldn't think. I didn't know what to say. If you had asked me my name, I wouldn't have known I ever had one. I went back in and slammed the door behind me as if the Devil himself had come asking for an excessively personal donation.

"Yes, that cold. And the first thing Noah thinks of is to go out there and bring in wood. Because we'd let the stack there by the woodstove peter out. So he's not going out for just one stick. He's going out to do the grand reload. Like a man would. A real man. The sort of man his father should have been, God rest his soul.

"Well anyway, he goes outside and comes back in two seconds later with his sweet little face all concerned and says, 'Ma, the wood crib's empty.'

"'Son,' I says, 'it is.'

"'Well, what we goin' to do?' he says.

"'Well, that's the next thing. What to do.'

"'You don't know what to do?'

"'I don't.'

"Here he goes to the kitchen for the tea cozy. His granddad, Daddy Mac, he used to wear it as a thinking cap, and Noah loved his crazy Daddy Mac. After a while he whips the cozy off and throws it down and hollers out, 'Well blamed if I can think of any goldurn thing!'

"He thinks a lot, my Noah, and he doesn't always talk like that. When he does, it means that somehow, known to him or not, he finds the situation laughable. And that helped. I says, 'Well, that makes two of us. So we're a team.'

Now there, you see, that was the grand solution. Happiness is all you need. So when I told that boy we were a team, that sorted everything. I sent him off to play his game and he was fine with that. He took Sir Barksalot and I don't think that poor dog stands a chance.

14 February 2020
Texas Jim
Prospect, Nova Scotia
www.granitecoast.ca