The route of my morning walk changed today as I scouted a new circular route taking in a stretch of riverbank. The change was opportune as today a series of life threads came together to produce an anti-node of unpredictability – I felt uncertainty at this point as to whether it should have been a node of predictability. However it is definitely the former, as the unpredicatibilties have all come together to reinforce each other and so maximize the effect.
It started with the weather forecast for today. Over the past five days it has changed from sun to rain, back to sun, then cloudy and this morning rain was forecast and outside it’s mostly cloudy. Then there was filling a prescription at the pharmacist who had filled the last one that I took in and now said that now it was impossible, so I took it to another pharmacist who filled it within an hour. Other minor things joined in the vendetta, culminating in my computer refusing to wake up when asked. It totally ignored all my blandishments until I finally got down on my knees and took hold of its surge protector; the little terror had eased the plug halfway out of the socket that it has been stuck in, untampered with for the past three and a half months! So clearly I had to make my morning walk fit the anti-node.
Larry and the Bear cont’d.
2
The Escape
All the Pritchards went to bed early; Bill and Moira had to start early next morning with their packing for the cruise, packing the boy’s stuff for the stay with the Johnsons (“and he’ll want all these toys” complained Moira) as well as getting things ready for his small birthday party before they took him to the Johnson’s.
The boy had been very quiet and had gone to bed without a murmur. Moira thought he must be eager to get to his birthday. But he had his plan prepared and as soon as the light was out, he climbed out of bed and pulled his backpack out of the closet. It was small and made to look like a monkey. He knew what he had to take; he packed a pair of socks, a shirt some underwear and another pair of pants just like he’d seen his Mom do when they went to stay at Grandpop’s last Christmas. He would wear his big coat, he decided, it had a big enough pocket to put Snuggie in. He got dressed and then went back to bed to wait, and he fell asleep.
He woke up feeling very hot and thirsty and pushed his bedclothes back. He could just see the face of his clock in the pale light. Mickey’s hands were both straight up above his head and that told him it was very late. Everything was quiet in the house when he opened his bedroom door, so holding Snuggie close he dragged his backpack and his coat down the stairs and into the kitchen. When he opened the ‘fridge, he saw a box of ‘Poptarts’ as well as the plate of Brownies. The Brownies were covered in ‘Clingfilm’, so he used that to wrap them in and then put them in his pack along with the “Poptarts’. Before he closed the door, he saw some individual juice boxes and filled up his pack with three of those. They were all blackcurrant, his favorite. He was very thirsty now but he knew that he would have to wait to have one until he’d escaped to the wood. He closed the door quietly and put on his coat and monkey-pack, and then slowly unlocked the backdoor and crept out closing it quietly behind him.
The edge of the woods was across the road and over a hundred yard stretch of grass and the boy reached the cover of the trees in just two minutes. This was public land and the trees were not dense here, and the underbrush was kept cleared to minimize any fire hazard to the houses in this small community of Blue Falls. The animal tracks through the trees made walking easy and some of the tracks had morphed into paths by the habitual use of the local dog owners.
TBC
