Mom, The Banana Slayer

Spring is traditionally hailed as the season of new life, blossomings and beginnings.

Of course, this year it seems to have gotten off to a cool, rocky start. Now warm, now cool and leaving us wondering when it will truly come to stay. It actually fits right in with my off again/on again puberty-stricken household.  I have four teenagers and one fifth grader who is starting to sprout the odd zit on his face but still noticeably absent in chest hair.

It was easier when their wardrobe preferences mirrored Cupid. You know, cherubic of smile, scarcity of girding in the loins and avoiding cleanliness as fast as their chubby, waddling little legs would carry them.

No more. Now, I knock for permission to enter their rooms, teach them laundry skills to facilitate their continual wardrobe changes  and watch my water heater feign loss of consciousness to catch a break under the continual threat of, “I need a shower, Mom.”

It’s a process and highly entertaining to watch, these awkward steps to potential in the nuptial.  Bugle Boy takes a strictly clinical approach to affection.  As he informed me recently:

“It’s not really true that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.  Your food actually goes past your heart on the way down to your stomach.  You food would actually have to do a u-turn.”  Well, at least he has the physiology down. You and I both know that the moment love hits him for the first time and his heart instantly lodges itself in his throat?  He will eat every last one of those words.

This would be the same son who, along with Java, recently engaged in a burping contest, another obvious attempt at the mature and amorous.  They’d gone to a friend’s house for the afternoon and I was informed of this particular event via their friend’s mother.  My only consolation here was that Mom Number Two was gracious enough to declare her offspring the undisputed winner.  I didn’t argue with her and since there isn’t more to be said here, let’s move on to Hurricane.

Namely, her take on David and his required dowry of one hundred post-mortem Philistines for the hand of King Saul’s daughter, Michal:

“That’s disgusting. Who would want to marry a murderer?” She went on to express her disdain on El David’s going above and beyond the call of duty by actually offing double the required quota. It’s safe to say I won’t be planning a military-themed wedding. Come to think of it, she is pretty much an army of one anyway.

Of course, I’ve been amassing troops of another sort recently, so maybe I’m to blame.  I pride myself on being a decent housekeeper. I dust, sweep, mop, clean the bathrooms, etc… regularly. I even throw in a deep clean annually. Well, sometimes you just miss stuff.

I was cleaning the top of my refrigerator and bumped against something that just wouldn’t budge. I tried again. Nope. Time to get the chair and see what was atop the old food box. There they lay. Side by side. Two bananas obviously in the final stages of rigor mortis, ebony as they could be and sporting a decidedly ivory bacterial-in-swirl. Oh, and clearly the rigid hosts to a rapidly rising fruit fly convention.

Don’t ask. Please. And don’t tell. EVER.

My refrigerator still isn’t speaking to me.

Well, there you have it. We may not have love, cleanliness or godliness figured out at this house, but glimpses of them keep popping up in all kinds of interesting. I’m just going to let them grow.

Soli Deo Gloria.