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Pie Night and the Revenge of the Spurge

We've told them many times. 4 times exactly. My children and the Brothers for some reason like to play in the Leafy Spurge that grows in the gully behind their grandparent's house. Because the toxic weed excretes a milky and sticky fluid, they wipe the sap on their faces and arms as war paint. 12 hours later they pay the price for their wild foray into the traditional past. Hives, blisters, and red puffy marks follow the same designs as the war paint like some symmetric allergy. The first time it happened, we could not figure out what it was. Five of them, all covered in their tribal welts.

On the day before Thanksgiving, We invite the neighborhood over to my in-law's house to celebrate an early feast before the next day's main event. We call it pie night. The theory is that we never have enough room to eat as much pie as we want with turkey, stuffing, potatoes, gravy, cranberries, salad, and whatever you stuff your face with on Thanksgiving, so we eat our pie on the night before the feast. Everyone is invited, every family or group brings a pie. The result is a lot of pies and a lot of people. We have yet to finish all of the pies and we can only guess at how many people came. Ray guesstimates that there were at least 84 people who showed up.

The evening is awesome. I enjoy talking with people once I'm in the situation. One thing that most people don't know about me is that I really enjoy my solitude, but once in the company of others, I tend to open up once I am in the situation. It is just getting me to the company that extends the extreme effort of my wife. I think that my desires lean toward reading stories of others instead of living my own.

As I said, the evening was wonderful. I love deep, intellectual conversation and Pie Night provides the perfect opportunity. The night was warm, the guests were entertaining, and the children were outside playing with flashlights in the dark.

I have fond memories of the night games of my childhood. "No bears are out tonight" and hide and seek were the stock of my adventures growing up. At one point I looked out at the kids and saw that they were playing some zombie game of their own. There was a fair amount of screaming, something that I had to address a couple of times but only in a half-hearted way.

Had I known that they were rubbing the sap of a noxious weed on their faces, I would have stopped them then and there. But there are lessons that must be learned and there are facts that hold us to the consequences.


Oh yeah, Griffin, in his own words, "bonked my head on Jaxton's head so hard that my tooth popped out."


I have to laugh. I sure love those little ones. The pie was good too.

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